


The Whole City Rearranges

by Ladyriver13



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Explicit Sexual Content, Hinata Shouyou & Oikawa Tooru Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Iwaizumi Hajime is Filthy, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Pro Volleyball Player Iwaizumi Hajime, Pro Volleyball Player Oikawa Tooru, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:55:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 55,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25962451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladyriver13/pseuds/Ladyriver13
Summary: ‘In between watching the heat mirage flicker over the asphalt road, he cast his eyes out over the sweeping white bay beneath them, decorated by clusters of colourful beach umbrellas. On days like this, he thought to himself, he could almost believe that he was where he was meant to be, that he was happy.’Tooru was on the top of his game, the win he’d just snagged in the Portuguese beach volleyball championships only the prelude to a perfect off-season spent, he hoped, lying on a beach in Lisbon sipping Muay Thais. If his wretched heart was still half-way around the world where he’d left it, then no-one had to know that but himself. When he caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd, though, his best-laid plans began to derail. When, a few days later, he found himself roped into a road trip of international proportions, he could safely say that if nothing else, he’d learned one thing: never get between Shouyou Hinata and an adventure.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 72
Kudos: 130





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first contribution to the Haikyuu! fandom so I thought it was only fitting it was for the GOAT that is Iwaoi. This was inspired by a long drive and a perfect playlist, then next thing I know I’ve written over 50K words of gratuitous road trip self-indulgence. The title is from mxmtoon’s song Bon Iver, and is one of many ditties that kept me writing. Never fear, I’ve written all of it but am still editing the later chapters so I hope to update bi-weekly when I get my act together. There is explicit sexual content in the later chapters but I’ll tag that properly when we get there, so buckle in.
> 
> This monster would never have gotten out of my head without the incredible Antiquity who look my little fledgling of an idea and helped me shape it into the behemoth it is today —much much love, and to all, please enjoy my humble first offering!

Tooru was happy. With the Portuguese sun shining down on his shoulders as he walked along the sandy esplanade and a dry breeze playing through his sweat-dampened hair, there was every reason to be. He nodded at a couple of cute girls who had been playing on the adjacent court that morning and smirked as he heard them giggle to one another. 

Nearing his destination, he took the towel from around his shoulders and used it to dust the sand from his forearms. That destination, none other than the best beachside breakfast joint in the whole of Porto, was run by a quick-tempered and sharp-tongued blonde man with piercings all the way up both ears. His face, animated as it was by thick, expressive brows, always seemed to tug on Tooru’s recollections. 

After calling out a greeting to the staff who, by this time, all knew him by sight, Tooru slid into a seat on the blue-and-white tiled verandah. The spot offered him a full view of the beach, and more importantly of the beach volleyball court which sat under the sparse shade of a few palm trees. 

The court wasn’t the professional grade Tooru had grown used to playing on since arriving in Portugal some months ago, but he had spent many a blissful afternoon on it all the same, knocking a volleyball around with some of the people who played in his league and a few who didn’t. Sometimes even just with friendly tourists passing through. A group of young beach-goers was playing on it now, novices who didn’t know the difference between a proper receive and a blatant carry, but Tooru’s lips curved up slightly watching them all the same. 

A year ago he would have scorned seeing volleyball being played so poorly, his own talent being so prodigious that he had mercifully powered through the awkward stages of early volleyball learning. His relationship with the sport had changed though, after he had nearly blown out his knee in an intensive training camp before his first semester of university in Tokyo. 

He had never intended to move away from the hard court, but had been forced to do so while he worked on fixing whatever was wrong with his traitorous knee. A career which began with beach volleyball was a hundred times preferable to no volleyball career at all. 

So, while still profoundly in love with the sport and intending to dedicate his life to it, Tooru had been convinced to delay his plan to segue directly from university-level volleyball into the professional league. By giving himself a couple of seasons here, he had time both to heal and to learn a different style of volleyball. 

This new style had been difficult for him to master in the beginning, partly because it relied heavily on early intuition and being able to strike quickly to read one’s opponent to compensate for the dampening effect of the thick sand on all movements. As was Aoba Johsai’s way, he had always excelled at studying his opponents and acclimatising to their attacks as they were dealt, but on the beach court he had found he couldn’t afford to squander the early points as he waited to learn his opposition’s style. 

This he had had to learn to counteract the obvious handicap of having four fewer bodies on the court: superior jumping ability and reaction time counted for little to nothing if you weren’t already moving in the right direction. 

He smiled to himself as he watched the cluster of sunburned tourists become bogged in the sand while trying to jump for the ball, struggling with that exact phenomenon.

As one of the waitresses, a cute little thing with a pixie cut and an impish grin, brought his habitually over-sweetened black coffee to him, he recalled the exact conversation when he’d finally capitulated and agreed, tears dripping down his chin and his heart breaking, to stop what he had been doing, change something, otherwise the next time he came down wrong on his knee he wouldn’t be able to walk it off. 

He’d been held him as he cried, by the strongest arms he knew, but the look on that stony face told him that he was not going to be allowed back onto another hard court until he could say absolutely and undeniably that his knee wasn’t hurting anymore — a goal which had seemed at the time unattainable. The problem was —

“<Hey, what’s got your pretty face so twisted this morning?>” the waitress asked as she paused to collect empty cups from the table next to his, effectively breaking him out of his reverie. 

He put a hand up to his hair and smiled sheepishly, answering in accented Portuguese, “<Sorry, I was in a land of my own.>” As she began to walk away, he called after her, “<And you really think I’m pretty?>” She snorted and waved her finger at him without turning her head, and the owner rolled his eyes and muttered something deprecating about pretty boys. Business as usual. 

The problem was, Tooru thought to himself after he had finished his breakfast and began the short walk back to the training courts, that even though his knee had begun to feel better and hadn’t hurt him during a game or physical therapy for a couple of weeks now, some mornings he woke up and thought _what if I didn’t go back at all?_

The rest of the day passed in a similarly sun-drenched fashion. Service training took up the early afternoon, physical therapy the early evening and a mock game between him and his partner and another pair of international players rounded out the night in what Tooru considered to be very good style. 

It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to go back to Japan and play in the Japanese premier league, and maybe even one day wear the red jersey sporting the rising run for his country. On the contrary: the desire to be back home was as real as if a string had been tied to the left side of his rib cage just below his heart, and when he thought of home he could feel someone tugging on it gently. 

The thing that had stayed his hand, those late nights in the first three months when he hadn’t been able to sleep for homesickness and had stared at flight timetables on his phone, was the thought of who exactly was tugging on that string. If he could stay here a little longer, maybe that string would be severed and he would no longer long to be back by _his_ side, and consequently back in Japan. It had become impossible to separate the place from the person, and so as long as he remained in love with his best friend, he would stay out of Japan until his feeble knee and his feebler heart had recovered.

xxx

“<Serve, Oikawa!>” his partner praised as the ball came tearing away from his hand and swerved in a punishing sideways arc. It landed with a spray of sand on the sideline half a foot in front of the receiver who had dived to pick it up. He allowed himself a small prideful smirk before he turned back to the baseline to set up another serve. Tonight was the grand final, the last night of the season and the final game before a four-week break from the bi-weekly games that he lived to look forward to. 

He and Raul had taken the first and second sets, but were struggling to secure the third comfortably, the French-Italian duo they were playing against having caught their second wind around the 13-point mark. They had been just short of neck-and-neck at 21-22 to their opposition, but the tight service ace which Tooru had just pulled would help swing momentum in their favour. He sent another serve in the same sweeping arc to the opposite sideline, the accompanying cry of “ _olé_ ” apparently having followed him halfway around the world, but the receiver on that side was quicker on his feet and managed to get a forearm under it. 

The ball curved in an arc onto the fingers of the man’s teammate as if drawn there by a magnet, and the set was equally precise, a perfect pipe. The spike would have landed at Tooru’s feet if Raul hadn’t got one of his wide tanned hands to it, but the block wasn’t powerful enough to stop it from breaching their side of the court entirely. Tooru dove forward to receive it, sand spraying every which way around him, and, having already used up two touches with the block and the receive as were the rules in beach volleyball, Raul leaped up to set the ball into the far corner of their opposition’s backcourt. 

His black Brazilian eyes tracked a path only he could see, swivelling back and forth as if he were watching every scenario play out in front of him. As their opponents dove futilely towards the ball only to watch it plummet at their fingertips, though, it seemed that fate had favoured them. Only one more point to match point, Tooru thought with feverish excitement, wiping sand from his bare chest. 

They lost the very next point following this thought, the volleyball gods never being quite so benevolent, and the crowd was whipped into a frenzy as the Frenchman and the Italian celebrated their point viciously, baiting Raul and Tooru to lose their composure. Tooru just held out his hand to his teammate as he got back to his feet, and the Brazilian reached out to slap a quick high five. They stood side by side, arms out and weight balanced on the balls of their feet as they waited on a hair trigger for the oncoming serve. 

The Italian spun the ball between his fingers, sharp eyes darting over Tooru and Raul from beneath heavy brows. He stood in the very corner of his backcourt diagonally opposed to Tooru, which could mean he was going to try hit a line shot service ace like the one Tooru had stolen from him only a point before. Tooru could hear his blood roaring in his ears as he tried to read what the serve would look like, and as his breath slowed the susurrus of the crowd died away. When the server had chosen his target he lifted the ball slowly between both hands and threw it in a gentle arc above his head, keeping his hands raised as he took two slow steps forward. 

_It’s going to be a jump float_ , Tooru’s mind supplied as he watched the man leap in slow motion, the thought occurring between one heartbeat and the next. _Too risky to hit a line shot, he’s going to hit cross court towards me._ Another heartbeat. _He’s hoping it’ll fall short and I’ll be forced to receive it too close to the net so we won’t be able to form a counterattack, or that I’ll fumble the dig and give them a chance ball._ Another heartbeat, and before the ball even hit the server’s hand Tooru was dragging his feet forward through the sand to propel him closer to the centre line, his hands coming up in readiness to receive the ball overhand rather than risk a dig. 

By the time the serve, a perfect float, crossed the net, Tooru was already positioned directly below it and let it kiss his fingertips before he propelled it upward towards Raul. Swinging his long arms backward, Raul leaped into the air to meet the ball, his hands coming up as if he meant to spike it straight from the receive. At the last moment, just as the Frenchman leapt after him to block it, Raul softened his hands and instead set the ball sideways straight into the path of Tooru’s downward-swinging hand. Everything slowed to a crawl before Tooru’s eyes as he hung in the air above the net. He watched with exaggerated slowness as his own middle finger flicked down through the central axis of the ball, sending it spinning in a punishing cross court. 

The blocker who had leapt at Raul had just realised his mistake, and the look of horror on his face as he wretchedly swung his arms the other way towards Tooru —too late, he had reached the summit as Tooru was still crouched to jump— would have been heartbreaking if it wasn’t so funny. A heartbeat before the ball hit the sand, Tooru watched with wide frantic eyes as the receiver threw himself bodily after it, moving sluggishly in a horizontal line that surely wouldn’t intersect with the ball’s trajectory in time to save it. But as his own body began to fall back down, and as the ball grazed the top peaks of sand without the grace of the receiver’s hand between them, a familiar flash of orange in the crowd of spectators behind the opposite baseline drew his eyes. 

Sand exploded around the ball as it struck the ground unclaimed, the crowd roared and chanted their names feverishly as the scoreboard flicked to 24, and Tooru stood staring into the astonished amber eyes of Karasuno’s number 10. It was difficult to say which of the two looked more surprised, both mouths hanging open, both sets of brows raised, but it only lasted a second before Tooru’s focus was reclaimed by Raul slapping him on the back and pulling him closer by the nape of his neck until their foreheads rested together. “<Championship point, little bull,>” he panted, grin almost manically wide. 

“<And of course you’re up to serve, you attention whore>.” Tooru bared his teeth in a grin which was significantly sharper and tilted his head back to look down his nose at Raul. “<Don’t let me down, now, Rio.>” A loud laugh was Raul’s only response as he broke away to run to the baseline, catching the ball tossed to him by the second referee. After the whistle signalling the start of Raul’s eight seconds, Raul’s slow, deep breathing as he steadied himself was the only sound Tooru could hear. The crowd seemed to hold its collective breath. He stretched one hand above his head towards the net and, with the other which he held behind his back facing Raul, extended his middle and pointer finger downwards. 

With a graceful flick of his wrist, Raul tossed the ball above his head and leapt to smack it crosscourt over the net. It wasn’t the hardest he could serve but it was still by no means an easy receive. The Italian number 1 received it nonetheless, not cleanly but with enough height that his teammate could get under it with a high back set to the right. As the Italian leapt to get the final touch, Tooru came up to meet him in a tall block, but his fingertips only brushed the ball as it blew past him on the left. He heard the spiker’s satisfied grunt at having avoided the block, followed a second later by the solid sound of leather on skin as Raul connected it in a clean receive. 

Tooru had enough breath left in his lungs only to huff a tiny laugh at his opposition’s arrogance as he twisted to meet the ball with a jump set. His crosscourt block had been largely ornamental to force the spiker to hit down the line where Raul would be waiting to receive it, clued in by his hand signal, since he couldn’t get enough height in this soft sand to attempt a kill block without risking a tough-to-save ricochet. The spiker had still bought it though, as spikers tended to do, and had sent the ball directly onto Raul’s waiting forearms. It was a move he had learned from watching Karasuno’s handling of Ushiwaka’s power spikes, and had adapted it to the soft court himself. 

As his fingertips connected with the ball, he felt rather than saw Raul sprint up to the attack line in what looked to be a pipe, then cut across diagonally behind him in a slide set-up. The ball flew behind him in slow motion, his back curving as he bent backwards to watch its arc until it was intercepted by the appearance above the net of a living shadow. Raul was several inches taller again than Tooru and at least half a foot broader in the chest, and despite the almost permanent cheeky smile he wore and the good-natured bluster he spouted, when the set was perfect as this one was and his eyes burned with that lust to hit it until it _broke_ he could almost have been mistaken for a demon. 

The ball came away from Raul’s palm with a sharp crack and ricocheted against the outstretched hand of a desperate blocker. It soared above the oppositions’ heads towards their baseline. The Italian managed to get a foot under it before he ploughed into the crowd, giving it a few extra meters of height but not succeeding in changing its direction. The Frenchman off whose hands the ball had begun its fateful downward trajectory had recovered from his failed block and was halfway across the court. Each meter of ground he gained, though, was another meter closer to the sand that the ball fell. In the final meter he threw himself forward, heedless of the spectators already scattered by his teammate. His fist connected with the ball and managed to give it enough lift to send it back towards the net.

Tooru and Raul stood side by side at the net, hands raised and knees bent at the ready to prevent this final desperate act from getting the ball back to their side of the court, but at the last second the ball hit the net a foot below the tape at the top and dribbled down to fall, unmoving,on their opposition’s court. A moment of silence followed as every eye stared at the ball, perched innocuously on the sand and illuminated by the beams of multiple spotlights. Then the roaring started. 

The crowd, or what wasn’t currently trying to pick itself up after being trampled by two athletes, cheered and whistled, plastic bottles smacking together in cacophonous harmony. Several of the other players from their league hurdled the barricades as Tooru and Raul turned to face each other speechlessly, twin looks of shock split a moment later by identical grins just as their friends jumped onto their backs. They had _won_. 

Arms jostled him and hands ruffled his hair, and he couldn’t pick out any one sound in the tumult surrounding him. He would have been overwhelmed and swept away by the chaos if not for the grounding hand he kept latched onto Raul’s bare hip. Speaking of chaotic forces, a sudden flash of orange as someone waved their shirt above their head caught his eye. Of course, he had forgotten about Karasuno’s shorty. He glanced around him, turning his head this way and that as he searched faces to find a familiar one. 

He didn’t even pause to think that maybe the pipsqueak had left already; everything that Tooru had observed of his character told him that subtle exits weren’t his style. At that moment one of the Greek players he had beaten the week before bent to scoop Tooru onto his shoulders. Once he had steadied himself with one hand on top of the head below him and another on Raul’s shoulder where he had been similarly hoisted up beside him, Tooru once again cast his eye over the crowd in search of a thatch of orange hair. 

There he was — standing by the post with the game ball in his hands. His face was bright and open, eyes shining as he looked up at the victorious pair and mouth wide open in excitement. They locked gazes for a second and it was like being back in highschool, like the three intervening years hadn’t passed and he was back playing in Seijoh blue and wearing number one, so little had his face changed. 

In the next moment the second ref came over to tap Shorty on the shoulder, hand held out for the game ball he was squeezing between his palms, and their eye contact was broken. Tooru turned his attention back to the revelry beneath him, and his joy was renewed by the smile on Raul’s face which was so wide he couldn’t seem to open his eyes. 

He motioned to the man beneath him that he wanted to be set down, and slid off his shoulders to walk towards the net where their dejected opponents were waiting. With Raul by his side, he reached out to clasp hands first with the Frenchman then the Italian who murmured weary congratulations, before turning to his right to thank the first and second referees. 

It had taken him a while to get used to the physicality of life in a Romantic country; where he was used to bowing to convey his respect, here everyone wanted to shake his hand, pat his back and kiss his cheek. However, when again their friends descended on them he couldn’t say he minded all the hands welcoming him back to the circle. 

When a cry of “To the bar!” went up, though, he sent them on ahead laughingly, pulling out and donning the warmdown gear from his bag. As he stood folded forward into a full-body stretch he heard his name being called followed by the crunch of sand before him, and he straightened up to smirk down into amber eyes. “So,” he said, the Japanese easy on his tongue as he rested a hand on one cocked hip, “what did you think?” 

Karasuno’s shorty radiated pure energy beneath his gaze, hands balled into fists by his chest and eyes wide. “That serve you did was like WHOOSH it was so cool how did you manage to get it to swerve like that even though you hit it so hard? And that last point was crazy! I was sure they’d get it back over, but I guess you knew they wouldn’t or you were super confident in your block because you didn’t have anyone left to receive if it got through, that was super ballsy I was like—” 

Tooru laughed as the little redhead continued to trip over his own tongue, and he met Raul’s amused eyebrow raise over the top of his orange head. “<A fan of yours?>” the latter murmured, not needing to understand the rapid Japanese to discern the current of excitement underneath. 

“Tell you what, shorty,” he interrupted; “we’re going to the bar to drink to our current prowess and future success. Come along, if you want, and I’ll talk volleyball to you all you’d like if you promise to buy me a beer.”

xxx

So it was that Tooru found himself, several boozy hours later, leaning his chin on his knuckles as he watched the red-headed firecracker —Hinata, he had been reminded several times —through hooded eyes. The bar had begun to empty half an hour ago, and from the corner of his eye Tooru could see the bartender openly collecting empty glasses and half-drunk bottles of warm beer. 

The night had been one of the best Tooru had had in a while. He had only to make a motion of getting up to go to the bar before someone had bought him another round, first of beer and later whisky, and the conversation had been lively and energetic. The whole night had felt buoyed by an electric energy that made it seem as if this little bar on the edge of a Portian beach in the middle of summer was the centre of the world for the night. 

Even the morose Italian player he had defeated perked up enough as the night wore on to attempt to flirt with the uninterested server, and her subsequent rejection had at least given him something else to mope about. Raul had left not long after, on the arm of the same server, and had blown Tooru a kiss and a wink as he floated out the door on her heels. 

“—and I didn’t make it into the Olympic team so I thought I’d give beach volleyball and try, so I was going to go to Brazil but someone told me the Portuguese league was better for beginners because you get to play a lot more games a season and I just want to be on the court as much as I can be, so that’s why I came here, and I thought I’d arrive a little early so I could watch the end of the summer season but I had no idea you played in this league, that’s still blowing my mind! Just wait till Kageyama hears about this!” 

That roused Tooru from his contemplative stupor. He switched the weight of his head from one hand to the other, tilting his chin inquisitively. “Mmwhat’s little Tobio been up to, anyway?” 

Hinata paused just before launching into another paragraphed sentence. “Kageyama? Oh he made the Olympic team as their reserve setter, now I think he’s playing on Ushiwaka’s team? I know,” he continued, as he saw Tooru wrinkle his nose in displeasure. “For a guy who looks so cool on the court, Ushiwaka is very not cool off the court, super scary and kinda mean, you know he told me once that shrimps are only good for eating and it totally threw my game I was like whaa— but,” he collected himself when he saw Tooru’s blank look of incomprehension at the non-sequitur; “it must be nice to play on a team where you know people still.”

He glanced down at the beer he had been nursing for the entire chunk of time it had taken Tooru to down three whiskeys.

“When I said I was going to play in Portugal, Kageyama told me that I would be back in Japan in one month tops with my tail between my legs because I would get so lonely from not knowing anyone and not being able to talk to anyone, but I don’t think he’s right, I mean that’s kind of the point right? Even if you get a little scared and a little sad sometimes doesn’t mean you should just quit and go home, even if there are people you miss there, because if those people understand you then they should be okay to let you go on your own for a little while, even if you are sad without them, and the people who don’t get it are the ones who would have held you back anyway.”

Tooru felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured on his head, that familiar hand clenching around his heart. He wished his brain was a little less fuzzy and his eyes a little more able to focus so he could control his face back into its usual mask. Instead he felt his brows furrow, and his traitorous mouth asked, “Is there someone at home that you miss, then? Someone who might have understood?” 

“Well,” Hinata paused, the first show of hesitation of the night, but it wasn't uncomfortable. “I mean, I guess there was someone that I thought I wouldn’t mind going home to, if this fell through. We weren’t really, I mean they weren’t _my_ someone. But I thought they might have been, one day, you know?” Oh how Tooru did, but he kept his gaze measured and tilted his head, inviting Hinata to keep talking. 

“I used to think about them all the time when I landed in Lisbon a couple weeks ago, and I’d be all ‘I wonder what they’re doing now’, ‘I wonder if they’re thinking about me too’. But,” he puffed out his cheeks in thought and ran his fingertip across the rim of Tooru’s empty beer glass mindlessly; “I actually haven’t thought about them much in the last week. Since I started watching the semi-finals my brain kinda got all ‘volleyball volleyball volleyball!’” —here he laughed self-deprecatingly “—and I guess this might even be the first time I’ve thought of them since.” 

Tooru glanced sharply —as sharply as he could with the double vision he was currently blessed with —at Hinata’s face, searching for signs that he might be about to cry, in which case Tooru was certainly no longer equipped to deal with this conversation. The younger man’s face was peaceful though, with a softness around his eyes that Tooru had never seen on him before making him appear several years older. 

Tooru blinked slowly. “So,” he started, speaking out in defiance of the inner Tooru who was yelling at him to let this dangerous subject drop before Hinata asked the inevitable question. “What, you don’t want to go back home to them after you’re done here, then?”

Hinata glanced back up at him, his face splitting into a wide toothy grin that belied the pensiveness of his expression moments before. “Oh I didn’t say that, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future! I just mean that me missing them isn’t going to be the reason that things don’t work out here, you know? It has nothing to do with them, it’s just about how I feel about them. After all, if I haven’t thought about them at all since I started watching the games then they shouldn’t have the power to make me do or not do something, right? If being away from someone makes you not think about them, then it’s a sign that maybe they’re not right for you right now. That’s what I think anyway.” 

For the second time that night, Tooru felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest by something quadrupedal. His treacherous mind conjured up the one face he had been determinedly suppressing, that surly countenance he thought of every night before he went to sleep and every morning before he brushed his teeth, and he bit his tongue hard in retribution. 

“Anyway, enough about me,” Hinata chirped, looking around the bar as if someone besides themselves and the weary bartender were left —perhaps hiding beneath the stacked chairs. “Where is Iwaizumi? I didn’t see him at any of the games, only that super tanned guy you won the championship with.”

The little prick.

After the initial whole-body freeze at hearing the name, Tooru schooled his face into polite confusion. “Iwa isn’t here, what makes you think that? He’s playing for a V-league team in Japan still; in fact I think it may be the same team your old captain plays for. Sawamura, wasn’t it?” 

Brow creased in confusion, Hinata opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. “But… I thought for sure he’d be here. Don’t you always go places together?” 

Tooru’s smile turned a little sharper. “I don’t know what you mean. Iwa is his own man, I hardly have him tied to my apron strings. Besides, I’m only here until I’m rehabilitated enough to get back onto hard court, so there’d be no point in him following me here.”

“Oh so you’re going back to Japan soon?” Hinata asked excitedly.

“No, that’s not what I—” 

“Although you probably want to go see them play in Switzerland first, right?” 

“No, I— wait, Switzerland?”

Hinata gave him a bemused look and cocked his head. “Yeah, Switzerland. Some of the top V-league teams got selected to play in a kind of new World Cup tourney they’re trialling this year. Apparently it’s only going to happen like once every couple of years and they travel around to different cities to play against all these different teams, it’s so cool! Anyway, Daichi’s and Kageyama’s teams got selected so they’ll be playing the European teams in Berne in a couple of weeks, so since it’s happening during your off-season I figured you’d want to go.” 

Tooru hummed lightly and swirled the dregs in the glass before him, clamping down on the urge to splutter that he hadn’t known anything about this tournament, that Hajime hadn’t told him they’d be within only a few countries of one another in a couple of weeks’ time. 

It wasn’t like they hadn’t spoken to one another recently, either. They video called every fortnight or so, and texted infrequently between these calls. Certainly they hadn’t scheduled a call in the last 15 days, but he had sent Hajime a volleyball meme three days ago, and had received a typical deadpan response within minutes. Would that not have been the perfect opportunity to bring up the fact that they might be able to see one another soon? 

“By the way,” Hinata said, once again cutting across his thoughts; “is the bartender a friend of yours? Because he’s been staring at us for the last like ten minutes and I’m not sure what he wants, but I’m sure I could fight him if you wanted me to.” Tooru glanced in the direction of the bar and sure enough met the tortured eyes of the bartender who stood polishing glasses aggressively in the corner. A laugh started out of him and he put a hand on Hinata’s arm in mock restraint. 

“I’m quite sure he’ll stop once we leave. I suppose he doesn’t want to stay here all night for our sake, charming though we might be. Come on, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.” 

Tooru pushed himself to his feet —and immediately regretted it. His head swam and he felt as if he’d left half of his body behind. Just as he was in danger of staggering forward or falling back to the seat, he felt a steadying hand on his bicep. However, before he could tug away and protest pridefully that he was perfectly capable of walking on his own, thank you very much, Hinata pressed a hand to his own forehead and laughed self-deprecatingly. “Wow I think that beer went straight to my head, sorry I totally just grabbed onto you like a girl.” 

Tooru shot him another sharp look, but didn’t shake him off when, walking through the door into the early morning chill, Hinata leant his weight against his shoulder. This red-haired shorty was something of an enigma, Tooru concluded, staring at his placid profile. He didn’t know whether to categorise him as good-naturedly dumb, as his rapid speech and onomatopoeic stories suggested; or keenly perceptive in how he had gracefully saved Tooru from a graceless faceplant and had so obviously inferred a connection between Hajime and Tooru, whatever the nature of that connection may be in his mind. 

They stumbled down the road together, occasionally bumping shoulders as their sneakers scuffed along the uneven pavement. The sky still hadn’t begun to lighten and dew was heavy on the pavement, reflecting the dull burn of the streetlights flanking the esplanade. As they walked past a tall wall dividing the road from a parking lot, Tooru ran his fingertips along the brightly coloured mosaic of tiles which were ubiquitous throughout the whole city. 

“Hey, what are you going to do now the season’s over?” Hinata asked, rubbing childishly at his eyes. Tooru contemplated the droplets of dew on the tips of his fingers before curling his hand into a loose fist. 

“I’m driving to Lisbon tomorrow —I have some friends I might stay with there, and my lease here is up next week. Then probably flying to Brazil when Raul’s ready to go home.” 

Hinata glanced up at him, mouth open. “Oh, I need to get to Lisbon soon too! I meant to do a bit of travel before next season and all the flights from the airport in Porto are super expensive so I thought Lisbon would be cheaper. Maybe I could catch a lift with you?”

Tooru laughed and shrugged. 

“But Brazil, hey?” Hinata continued. “What’s in Brazil, besides the best volleyball team in the world?”

“Plenty, but that’s the reason I’m going. Raul wants to play in his home league next season and I’ve been thinking I might go with him.” He hadn’t told anyone else that yet, but the alcohol was still buzzing through his veins and warming his belly and he didn’t think it would be a bad thing for the first person he told to be a face he’d almost forgotten. 

Tooru felt Hinata’s wide eyes fix unabashedly onto his face. “Wow, so you’re really not coming back to Japan anytime soon!”

His throat suddenly and inexplicably dry, Tooru tilted his head in acknowledgement and rubbed one long finger across the bridge of his nose, obscuring his mouth. “Doesn’t look that way,” he responded coolly after a moment, and allowed Hinata to nudge him down another road towards a block of cheap-looking holiday flats. 

“That’s crazy, I guess I never thought when I left Japan that I’d be away for good, but you’ve got all your stuff sorted and you’re just going to go live in Brazil like whoosh.” He raised his hand palm down in a steep incline in what Tooru assumed was an imitation of a plane taking off. He wanted to point out that there was no ‘just’ about moving countries again, and that he’d only just made the decision himself a couple of days ago, but Hinata was talking again. 

“Man, I’m kind of jealous, Coach Ukai always told us that the only thing that was going to keep us from moving forward was if we kept looking back, but I don’t know if I’d be ready to just let go of everything yet.” Once again Tooru felt his hackles rise and his lip curl in a sneer, unsure if he was being baited or not. Again with the ‘just’, he thought with irritation. 

“It’s not like I’m going to be gone for the rest of my life,” he responded, sharper than necessary. “I mean,” he added more smoothly, “it’s a little childish to talk about ‘forever’ and ‘for good’, don’t you think?” 

Hinata paused, perhaps picking up on the barb Tooru had smoothed over with a condescending smile. He didn’t like feeling like he was wrong-footed, and ever since he’d started drinking with Hinata that evening he hadn’t felt as if he was totally in control of the conversation like he once would have been with this kid.

“Sure,” Hinata said, self-doubt colouring his words. “I mean, I don’t really have any plans for the next couple of weeks besides travel, or even for the next couple of months besides volleyball, but I guess you always seemed to know exactly what you wanted so I thought you’d have a lot more of a plan than me.” 

By this time they’d drawn to a stop outside a run-down three-storey apartment block, tiled terracotta facade cracked and grated front door propped open by a brick. Tooru stayed silent and kept his face impassive as Hinata dipped his hand into his pocket to retrieve a large old-fashioned key, which he rolled between his fingers nervously. 

Then he closed his palm around the key resolutely and looked up at Tooru, face open. “Hey, if it’s alright I’d still like to catch a lift with you to Lisbon tomorrow, I can pitch in for gas and everything, and I promise you won’t hate my music taste either, it’s actually pretty good. Surprisingly good was the word Tsukishima used - actually he said not totally horrendous but that sort of means the same thing with him.” 

Tooru huffed a laugh and relented. “I’ll take his word for it, but I don’t intend to find out either way. My car, my music, I’m afraid, but I guess I don’t mind if you want to come along.” 

For what seemed like the hundredth time that night, Hinata’s face split into a smile that was pure dazzling sunshine, and he gave a thumbs up. Tooru had a premonition he’d need to start wearing sunglasses if he was to survive this trip unblinded. He leaned against the doorframe and let his head fall back, watching down his nose as Hinata moved forwards to pull the heavy cage of the ancient elevator open. 

“I’ll be around in the afternoon to pick you up once I’ve picked up the rental car, I have some stuff I need to finalise first, prize money to collect, the usual.” Tooru smirked as Hinata rolled his eyes. 

The redhead paused just as he was about to pull the grate shut behind him. “You can get home from here fine by yourself, right?” he asked cautiously, then held up his hands with a deprecating laugh when Tooru’s smirk turned to a glare. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Great King,” he called back as the rickety old elevator screeched grudgingly into motion. 

As soon as Hinata was gone Tooru let the smirk slip from his face. He supposed it wouldn’t be so bad to have company on the drive, and it wasn’t as if it would take more than a couple of hours to drive the 300 kilometres, but a finger of unease curled in his stomach nonetheless. The firebrand kid he remembered being a tiny first year had grown up, and Tooru felt off-balance around him, like he was being seen and understood in spite of his flawless masks. Quite frankly, it pissed him off.

He pushed himself upright and, hands in his pockets, made his way not entirely linearly back along the street. When he hit the esplanade again he continued down onto the beach and turned left, letting the high tide keep him company on his walk home. He let the foam play around his ankles but made sure not to stumble too deep in case he fell like an idiot and drowned himself. The worst thing about the kid was that he made Tooru think about things he’d rather not, dredging up the parts of Tooru that he’d almost successfully hidden even from himself, all seemingly without even knowing what he was doing. 

_...you always seemed to know exactly what you wanted…_

He talked about what Tooru wanted as if he knew, or as if he thought Tooru ought to know, but the truth was that Tooru didn’t. He knew he wanted to play volleyball, but that was a given, more of a compulsion at this point than a conscious choice. He knew he didn’t want to stay in Portugal for much longer, too. His feet had begun to itch a month or so back, and with a championship under his belt and Raul going away soon there was nothing keeping him there. He thought he had wanted to follow Raul to Brazil, but the idea of it didn’t fill him with the same excitement he’d felt when he’d first heard about the Portuguese league and the full days of nothing but back-to-back games it boasted. 

Tooru sighed and shook his head, letting go of the pretence. For all that some people liked to tease him about being obtuse, Tooru was neither a coward nor un-self-aware. He knew that if he went to Brazil now he would be running away from something rather than towards it, and he also knew that the thing he would be running away from was the thing he truly wanted most in the world. 

His feet came to a stop by themselves at his threshold, and he raised his eyes to look at the faded green number four tile on his door. It gleamed mockingly at him, reflecting the rays of the rising sun, and Tooru swallowed around the lump in his throat.

_Damn._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back again! I was too excited to post so I couldn't wait, thanks to everyone reading and enjoying and I appreciate the notes and kudos!   
> As an aside, Raul calls Tooru ‘little bull’ because of course ‘bull’ in Portuguese is ‘touro’, which I thought was just too cute to pass up.

When Tooru woke up the following morning, sunlight streaming through his criminally open shutters, his first thought was that it may not yet be too late to drown himself in the high tide. The second was that his mouth tasted like something had crawled in it and died during the night, and his third, as he shifted against the sun-warmed sheets, was concerned only with the fact that someone must have driven a stake through his head last night for it to be hurting so bad. God, he didn’t miss hangovers. 

Determined not to let Sunday-night Tooru rob Monday-morning Tooru of his entire day, he slowly began leveraging himself out of bed and, when he caught sight of it, dove at the glass of water and box of painkillers he had thoughtfully left himself on his bookshelf like it was a lifeline. The smell of cheap, strong coffee revived him somewhat as he stood by the sink inhaling it, and a ravenously devoured half-dozen slices of bread straight out of the bag brought more colour back to his cheeks. 

After a half-hour spent sitting under the spray of his tiny closet shower on its hottest setting, though, Tooru still hadn’t recovered enough of his equanimity to consider leaving his house, let alone starting the day’s errands. He rested his back against the side wall of the shower cubicle, letting the water sluice directly onto his bowed head.

It seemed that the day wasn’t going to wait for him to be ready, though. A cheery knock sounded on his front door, then, a few seconds later, again at his bathroom door. 

“<Little bull, you had better put some pants on because I’m coming in. I brought you lunch, because I know how your head will be feeling this morning and I’m a wonderful friend.>” True to his word, Raul began to push open the door with a peremptory hand in front of his eyes. Tooru only had time to pull his legs closer to him and wrap his hands around his knees to preserve a modicum of dignity before his partner was standing over his shoulder, only a few millimetres of foggy glass between them. Raul dropped his hand and looked down at Tooru, his brows drawn in feigned sympathy while his expressive mouth curled in hidden amusement. 

“<This is not a good look for you,>” he said decisively as Tooru glared daggers up at him. “<You look like a drowned rat, but cuter.>” 

“<Maybe you should stop looking then,>” Tooru shot back, vitriol diluted by the whisky-burned huskiness of his voice. “<What was it you said about being a wonderful friend? Because personally I can’t see it.>” 

Raul only laughed, rich and deep and with his head thrown back, and exited the bathroom without shutting the door behind him. “<Get dressed and come eat, we’re going for a walk.>”

Later, as they walked side by side along the pale sun-bleached wood of the boardwalk and Raul began whistling the melody of  _ Volare _ , Tooru huffed in annoyance. “<How is it you’re not at all hungover?>”

Raul threw his arms wide and tilted his face to the sun, ever the dramatic. “<Ah but Little Bull, that would be telling! And a man doesn’t kiss and tell.>” 

Tooru raised his brow and swallowed his smirk. “<I think a man just did.>” 

Raul laughed again and began waxing poetic about the new love of his life who had kept him company the night before. Raul tended to fall in love quickly and with every pretty girl who would toss a smile his way, and always swore they were the most beautiful thing he’d ever beheld, even if the source of their beauty only came from the warmth and willingness of their smile. 

“<The kiss is the magic weapon, little one, if she can keep your heart rate up with her kiss alone then there’s no chance for the alcohol to get into your blood because you’re both burning it off so fast!>”

“I’m not quite sure that’s how it works,” Tooru murmured to himself in fond exasperation, extracting his phone from his pocket as he felt it buzz with an incoming text. When he read the name of the person who had sent the message, though, he felt his heart throb painfully. Deftly keying in his password  _ —1006 _ — Raul’s ramblings faded into the background as he read the message.

<<Iwa<<

10:47am

_ I just saw this on my dash. Congrats on winning the championship, that’s insane. I hope you’re proud of yourself you crazy volleyball shithead. _

Attached was a link to a Japanese media article covering the game and their comprehensive victory. The photo at the top had been taken directly after their supporters had swarmed the court, both Tooru and Raul sitting high on the shoulders of their friends and grinning like loons. One of Raul’s fists was raised triumphantly in the air while the other lay on Tooru’s shoulder, and in turn Tooru was clutching onto Raul’s waist with one hand while with the other he held onto the nape of his own neck. The photo had immortalised the moment they had finally turned to each other to share their elation, and Tooru’s lips quirked up in fondness at the familiarity the photographer had managed to capture, despite the off-key whistling happening beside him.

As he went back to staring at the original message, his eyes softened and he hunched over the screen to shade it from the harsh sunlight, eyes squinting down at the message. He had forgotten to text Hajime the previous night that they had won, and he didn’t like that he’d had to find out from reading it on the news. However, the message itself was so  _ Hajime _ that his traitorous heart couldn’t help doing a little skip of joy in his chest. 

>>Iwa>>

10:50am

_ Thank youu! It was a crazy game, you would have died @ the last few points, I had the crowd eating out the palm of my hand ;)  _

He hesitated before sending it, second guessing everything he’d just typed. Then he realised what he was doing, scoffed at himself silently for apparently having become a 15 year old girl, and sent the damn message. 

“<But what about you, little Tooru with the sad face?>” Raul’s question caught him off guard and he hummed an inquiry. “<When are we going to find you a pretty girl who can make these disappear?>” He prodded a finger between Tooru’s brows where a slight frown creased his skin. Tooru scoffed and batted his hand away. 

“<Yes I know, or a pretty boy,>” Raul amended, holding his hands up in concession. “<Someone pretty and sweet who can make love to Tooru and wake his heart. Maybe even someone who can break it for you, a broken heart can do many good things for a man’s outlook on life.>”

Ha. That was funny. 

Before he could respond, his phone chimed again and he glanced compulsively down at it. 

<<Iwa<<

10:59am

_ Haha, yeah right idiot. _

God, but if that wasn’t also so  _ Hajime _ . They had never been great texters, preferring to spend all of their time face to face, but since Tooru had moved away their conversation threads had gotten shorter and shorter. Now it seemed that they couldn’t even make it past three messages consecutively, and the air of awkwardness and unfinished-ness between them after each failed texting attempt felt stifling. Or rather, that’s how it felt to Tooru. He couldn’t speak for Hajime anymore.

“<Someone to break my heart, huh? Who do you recommend?>”

Raul considered him with faux sincerity, a blunt finger poised on his bottom lip. “<You need someone who doesn’t mind that you probably cry after sex—>” here Tooru squawked indignantly— “<and someone with great fucking stamina because you never get tired first. You also need someone serious I think, someone who won’t always laugh at your terrible jokes. I think you Japanese call it thundery?>”

Tooru’s eyes widened and he snorted. “<Do you mean  _ tsundere _ ?>” Raul’s eyes crinkled and he joined in as Tooru began to laugh at him. 

“<Someone who doesn’t give affection out easily,>” Raul added, “<not like these girls who fall in love with your pretty face and scream your name even though they should know your pal Raul is a much better lover. That way, when little Tooru does get their affection he feels extra special.>” 

In that moment Tooru felt very known, as if he had forgotten that after six months of constant close contact Raul probably knew him better than many of his old friends from high school. 

But it was with this knowledge that Raul would neither pressure him nor judge his decisions that Tooru caught his breath in anticipation and extended a hand to catch Raul’s arm. 

“<Hey Rio, do you remember how we spoke about me maybe coming to live with you in Brazil...?>”

xxx

The rest of the day passed in similar fragments, the dull throb of dehydration a constant companion behind his eyes. Their medals were conferred on the same court they had earned them the previous night, and the endorsement cheques signed in their names on the tiled veranda of the beach volleyball association’s clubhouse. 

Bags were packed and his house cleaned out, and still Tooru felt like he was moving on autopilot without any meaningful input from his brain. When it came close to the time he had said he’d be by the hotel to pick up the little red-headed pocket rocket, Tooru found himself still sitting on top of his packed luggage, an open jar of pickled onions in hand as he finished clearing out his fridge. 

He had said goodbye to Raul straight after the admin had been done, both of them going their separate ways to get their lives in order for the coming preseason changes, and even though Tooru knew he would see him soon he still felt a little morose as he munched on his mouthful. 

They had decided that they would meet in Lisbon in the week before the beach season began in Brazil, which would give Tooru just over three weeks without him. Tooru had an idea of what he wanted to do during those three weeks, but he supposed first he’d have to get up off his crumpled bags and pick up his rental car before they closed for the night. 

Sighing, he fished the last onion out of the jar and disposed of the liquid down the sink, brushing his fingers off on his jeans. He bent to collect his belongings and move them outside, and then, pausing only to sweep his gaze over his erstwhile home, closed the front door behind him and slid the key beneath it. 

The walk to the car rental place wasn’t far, just a few hundred meters along the shore front, but by the end of it Tooru felt significantly shorter from the weight of all the bags slung over his shoulders. The lady at the front desk gave him a politely sympathetic smile, narrow lips immaculately rouged, and it was a testament to how flustered he was that Tooru didn’t think to try to flirt with her once while he was filling out the paperwork. He had rented the cheapest car they offered for a week, but she assured him that if he needed it for longer he need only call the Lisbon office where he would be returning it to extend the lease, as no one was likely to want it soon. 

He understood why as soon as he saw it, sitting squat in the car park behind the office building. Off-white and long as a boat, the VW station wagon was probably only a few years younger than he was, and had no doubt seen about the same mileage. But no— it had four wheels, a roof, and would undoubtedly get him where he needed to go with adequate promptness if German engineering had something to say about it, and that was all he needed. Plus, the ridiculously long boot would serve well enough as a bed if he needed to pull over for the night. Not that he would need that if he was only driving to Lisbon to stay with friends. He shook his head.

A smiling assistant in a green uniform helped him load his bags into the back, then waved him off as he turned onto the street in the direction of the esplanade and Hinata’s hotel. When he arrived he had a moment of misgiving when he realised he didn’t know how to contact the pipsqueak. The sun was beginning to kiss the tops of the palm trees, and if he had been forced to check out by late morning as was customary then he may have wandered off somewhere in the interim. But as Tooru stood leaning against the hood of his frankly ghastly car looking up at the windows above, he caught sight of a face haloed by red hair looking down. 

“Hang on I’ll be right down I just need to grab my stuff. Cool car by the way!” 

Tooru grimaced. 

After far fewer seconds than he had expected, Hinata came barreling out of the doorway, panting as he hauled a massive suitcase behind him. Tooru reached out to help him load his packs into the back, trying to straighten the haphazard pile Hinata had dumped onto his own bags. 

Tooru cleared his throat. “I ah- didn’t mean to be here so late, errands took longer than I thought.” He raised a hand to the back of his neck guiltily. “I hope you didn’t have to pay extra to check out so late.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Hinata chirped as he clambered into the front seat. “It was an AirBnB so she was ok with me leaving whenever. I was just watching the sun start to set, it looked so pretty tonight I was just kinda excited that we’d get to drive all along the coast to watch it —hey, do you ever get used to how the sun sets over the ocean here rather than rising over it? It’s crazy, we really are on the other side of the world.”

Tooru had never really thought about it, simply chalking it up to one of the many little things that showed him he was far from home, but he supposed it had been weird the first time he’d watched it. It was even weirder to think that in a few hours that sun would be rising over Miyagi. 

“Yeah I know,” Hinata agreed, and he realised he’d been speaking out loud. “It’s like we should be able to attach little notes to it to send to our families in case they’re watching the sunrise, you know?” 

Tooru huffed a laugh despite himself and turned the car away from the ocean onto the road which took them south towards the A1. He’d panicked when he realised how old the car was purely because it meant the stereo system would be pre-aux certainly, and probably pre-CD player too. It seemed that somewhere along the way someone had cared enough about this car to upgrade the stereo, though, so that it at least had a jack to plug his aux cord into. 

As Hinata settled down in his seat to gaze out the window with bright eyes, Tooru reached into his pocket to pull his phone free and, keeping his left hand on the wheel, used his right to jam the aux cable in and tap the screen blindly about where he thought a good pop playlist he’d made would be. When  _ Magnolia _ by Gang of Youths came on he knew he had missed, but couldn’t be mad about the change. 

They drove in comfortable silence along the outer ring of the city, watching as, one by one, the constellations of city lights lit up the horizon. The sun was still hanging low in the sky, its soft orange glow putting them all to shame, but as the VW reached the Ponte da Arrábida, it had begun to sink into the ocean. 

Hinata yawned long and loud as they crossed the Douro River, his jaw cracking as he stretched his fists above his head. 

“Are you better now?” Tooru asked sarcastically, but Hinata only turned to smile at him.

“Yeah thanks! I’m super tired after last night, it was so hard to get out of bed this morning I almost didn’t make it out in time to have breakfast before the breakfast bar down the street closed. I usually don’t get to bed so late but I was having so much fun it didn’t seem like it was that late. Or early, more like,” he laughed. 

“Raul dragged me out of my room far earlier than I’d have liked this morning, so I didn’t have the chance to wallow in my headache,” Tooru commented, glancing over his shoulder as he merged onto the southbound A1 which would take them all the way to Lisbon. 

“Oh do you get headaches when you don’t have enough sleep too?” 

Tooru tilted his head to hide his smile, murmuring “something like that,” even as Hinata turned away from him to crow at the view of the coastline out his window. 

Another handful of minutes passed in silence which Hinata seemed content to leave unbroken. Tooru, though, was becoming more restless as he watched location markers flash past, illuminated by his headlights. 

“Hey...” he began slowly, “what’s your plan when we get to Lisbon? You said you wanted to do some travel, right. Where are you going to go?” 

“Hmm?” Hinata turned soft eyes back on him. “Oh, I’m not too sure actually, I don’t have any real plans, I figured I’d stay in Lisbon for a few days then catch whichever flight was cheapest to somewhere new.” 

“So, you don’t have anywhere you desperately want to go?”

“Not really,” Hinata said, drawing his legs up beneath him and angling his body to face Tooru. “I kinda just want an adventure, you know: this is my first time out of Japan so I want to have the type of stories that make people go  _ phwaa,  _ like they get excited when you start telling one. Kinda means I’m a little low on details, but I figure there’ll always be a place to sleep and people are nice everywhere, so I can’t go too wrong. Although, I don’t have a place to stay lined up in Lisbon yet, so I should probably get onto AirBnB before we get there.” 

He laughed then, no doubt acknowledging the ridiculousness of his own itinerary. “But first I think I need a little nap, this music is putting me to sleep. Will you give me an hour or so, wake me when we get closer?”

Tooru murmured assent, keeping his hands tight on the steering wheel as he heard Hinata settle back against the door, wrapping his arms around his middle. 

Surely he was crazy to think what he had just been thinking. Surely what he was planning wasn’t actually feasible; despite that it would be so so easy. He opened his mouth, ready to call out to Hinata, to at least ask his opinion rather than making the decision entirely for him, but when he glanced across the console Hinata was already breathing deeply in comfortable slumber. No point waking him for a hypothetical.

The playlist that he had queued was quite the opposite of what Tooru had been expecting to drive to, the slower ballads quickly getting under his skin in the worst way. Within a few songs, he had begun chafing his palms along the steering wheel and within a few more, he started to hum along to the morose melodies, tipping his head back at the most poignant lines and narrowing his eyes to squint at the road.

This highway would take him all the way to Lisbon if he chose to follow it; Lisbon, where he would be able to let Hinata out and, in all likelihood, never see him again. If he could just stay on track then he’d be able to spend a month sipping Mai Thais by the beach before retreating back to Raul’s overzealous fraternal guardianship.

However, as the minutes became quarter hours and the quarter hours added together to become a full hour’s driving in silence, Tooru knew he had to make his choice. The signs flashing by his window indicated that the next exit would take him towards Salamanca and the Portuguese-Spanish border, and sitting as he was currently in the right-most lane, he was about to be forced to exit onto the A25. 

If he took this exit, he would be re-routed eastwards towards Spain and Italy and Switzerland and other Western European countries. He wouldn’t make it to Lisbon tonight unless he merged back into the central lanes, and if he couldn’t then he’d be in Salamanca by nighttime.

Tooru glanced over his shoulder, but there was a truck hanging in his blind spot which wouldn’t allow him in if he indicated now. He leaned on the accelerator a little, trying to edge ahead of the truck, but it seemed to be having the same idea, speeding up when he did. The exit was fast approaching and Tooru bit his lip hard. If he couldn’t get back into the south-flowing traffic then he may as well stay on the A25 until it took him through some of the more interesting capitals of Europe like Madrid… and Bern. 

It wouldn’t be so unreasonable to follow this path, Tooru reasoned with himself as he clenched his hands on the wheel. Hinata had said he just wanted adventure, and what was more adventurous than crossing half a continent for someone who might not even want to look you in the eye when you arrived before them in a golden chariot which had seen better decades and with a companion who no doubt still believed that if things were really meant for you then you should let them be free to make their way back to you, and oh  _ god _ Tooru couldn’t do this he couldn’t stand before Hajime again and face those eyes which surely couldn’t help but condemn him because it was  _ Tooru  _ who had left and how could he possibly expect Hajime to forgive him so easily, when he didn’t know if he could in the same position—

Panicked breaths catching in his throat, Tooru flicked his indicator jerkily to the left as he tried to move out of the right-most lane. The truck was still behind him though, and he had to slam on the brakes to allow it to pass so that he could move into its lane, but even then the lane dividers began to widen into two solid white lines, and then a concrete island as the right-most lane was cordoned off to be siphoned out of the fast-flowing traffic. 

With cars behind him and cars to the left, Tooru had no choice but to keep moving forward along the exit ramp which took him away from the simplicity of the road to Lisbon, towards a labyrinth of highways into greater Europe. 

His breath caught in his throat, and it was only as an afterthought that Tooru stepped onto the brake as he rounded the 270 degree turn to stop them from flying over the railings. Only when the VW eventually flew out the other side and came to a stop at the traffic light at the base of the off-ramp, was Tooru finally able to peel his frozen fingers away from the death grip he had on the wheel.

As the light flicked back to green, he accelerated slowly away from the line, eyes bright and fixated directly in front of him. Tension bled from his shoulders as he merged onto the much quieter A25 and he let out a shaky breath, turning the volume dial up a notch. The plan had been percolating in the corners of his mind since the night before as he had lain in bed, half drunk, for hours while sleep eluded him. Now that he was actually on his way across Europe, though, he couldn’t stop the tendrils of anxiety that tweaked at his heart. 

The fear that Hajime wouldn’t want to see him was still very real, but worse was the fear that Hajime would be able to see him again without his breath catching and heart jumping into his mouth as it once had, and as Tooru’s did whenever he thought about him. However, the knot which had formed in Tooru’s chest the day he had left Japan hadn’t abated in six months, and wouldn’t, he now knew, until he could see his best friend again. 

After a quick google search Tooru had pinpointed the exact dates the Japanese teams would be in Bern, which gave him two weeks maximum to drive the almost-2000 kilometres —that was, unless he had to turn around and drop Hinata back in Lisbon if his travel companion wasn’t as itinerant as he had thought. He hoped that wouldn’t be case; if he had to drive into Lisbon, which had become in his mind a symbol of defeat, he didn’t know if he’d have the willpower to turn back around. 

Even as he thought this, Angie McMahon came on the stereo singing her rendition of an old ABBA classic, and the crease between Tooru’s thin brows softened a little. Hajime has teased him for loving the song as much as he did, playing it over and over again as he had until the words became meaningless.  _ Knowing me knowing you,  _ Tooru would croon to him as they stood shoulder to shoulder in Tooru’s mother’s kitchen cutting vegetables. 

He didn’t much care for the original, for which both his mother and Hajime declared him a heretic, nor did he ever bother to really listen to the lyrics as he sang along to the melody. Only much later, when he was sitting in his cramped airline seat, waiting to taxi onto the runway with his headphones screwed into his ears to drown out his thoughts, had he understood what she was saying. 

_ We just have to face it this time we’re through; breaking up is never easy I know, but I have to go. Oh knowing me knowing you it’s the best I can do.  _

Suddenly and irrationally irritated, Tooru twisted the volume dial down and huffed out a sigh. She had no right to get him in his feelings like this. As the monotonous farmland to his right gave way to craggy rock formations and wild heath, Tooru grabbed at his phone and vindictively queued a handful of happy songs. 

Judging by the change in terrain, they were passing the Parque Naturel da Serra da Estrela, which put them a little under two hours out from their destination. He could keep himself occupied for two hours. No more sad songs, he berated himself, and no more moping. Nothing was ever accomplished by thinking too hard about it, although if they gave out medals for overthinking he would certainly have earned a few golds by now.

The vapid pop anthems fell a little flat in the heavy air of the VW, made worse by the tinny treble of its stereo, but they made the minutes pass tolerably well. As they neared the Spanish border after an hour of uneventful driving, Hinata began to stir. Tooru glanced over at him, breathing a tired laugh when he saw the kid’s mouth hanging open, a small trail of drool making its way down his chin from the corner of his lip. 

He rubbed his tired eyes in sympathy, aware that by the time they arrived in Salamanca and found a hotel for the night it would be well past ten. This had been his choice though, much as the final plunge had been forced on him by fate in the guise of a road train, and he again sent out a silent entreaty that Hinata would be okay with the change of plans when he finally awoke. 

Just as they crossed the invisible line between Portugal and Spain, marked only by a faded sign and a cracked and dry bitumen truck stop, the last of the songs he had queued finally finished. Since he hadn’t selected a new playlist when he’d searched the songs, his Spotify reverted back to the one he had clicked on when they’d first left Porto. Post Malone’s questionable vibrato filled the car, and although he wanted to laugh at the idea of the jovial, almost comical Post Malone with his face tattoos and his henny singing about falling apart like his heart was breaking, Tooru felt the dull ache in his chest return. Damn, now even American music could get him in his feelings. 

When the song changed to something slower and rougher, though, he sucked in a breath and turned the volume back up thoughtlessly. If Angie McMahon was his guilty pleasure, then Augie March had been Hajime’s.  _ One Crowded Hour  _ had been the only slow song Hajime had listened to like it was a religion, adoring it even though he couldn't explain why, and it had been the soundtrack to many of their late-night conversations and whispered secrets. Even after they had outgrown blanket forts, they would still end up huddled under the same covers on one or other of their beds, one earbud to each of them as they told each other things no one else knew. 

It had been playing the night a fit of breathless laughter had ended with both of them staring at each other’s lips, but not the early morning several weeks later when they had finally put voice to the strange tension between them buzzing like electricity —although it still made Tooru think of that moment by association. God, Tooru had never even particularly liked the song, completely unable to understand the appeal, but it had permeated enough of his memories of Hajime that the sound of it still made him want to curl up under those blankets again. 

He knew every word by heart, and he began to sing them now, softly and a little hoarsely, safe in the knowledge that the only witness was sound asleep and drooling on himself. Sometimes it helped to let the emotions manifest, he rationalised, and Augie March had already done the hard work in forming them into words for him to sing along to. However, as the last refrain died away and Tooru drew in a deep breath, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

When he turned to glance at the passenger seat, he saw Hinata looking back at him, face open and relaxed. There was a knowing gleam in his eyes, totally clear of sleep, but no hint of judgement or mockery. He was still curled up on the seat, but when Tooru cleared his throat uncomfortably and felt his cheeks flush, he looked away and unfolded himself to stretch luxuriously. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Tooru said a little stiffly.

At that Hinata smiled something like his regular alligator smile, all teeth still, but his eyes were softer. “Don’t worry about that, my back was against the speaker so I guess the vibrations woke me up. By the look of it, it’s about time I woke up, how long was I out? I thought we’d be there by now for sure, I’m pretty terrible at geology —or is that the one with the rocks? —geography then, like I always look at the line on Google Maps and think ‘that won't take more than an hour, easy!’ Hey, the road signs have changed, that’s crazy! I didn’t realise there were different road signs for different parts of the country.”

Tooru grimaced. “Yeah, about that…” 

“Woah, that sign says it’s 300 kilometres to Madrid,” Hinata continued imperviously, twisting around in his seat to catch another glimpse; “isn’t Madrid in Spain? That’s so weird, it’d be like if our road signs said 500 kilometres to Australia or something— I mean, you know, if you could drive cars over the ocean.”

Clenching his hands rigidly at ten and two on the wheel, Tooru cleared his throat. “So you know how you said you wanted to find some adventure?” Hinata turned back to him, head tilted slightly in confusion. “Well, I figured an adventure might not be a bad thing for me either, so I thought it might be fun if we went on a little road trip to see some old friends of ours, somewhere a little more interesting than Lisbon, say, like Bern.” The cab of the station wagon was very quiet for a second. 

Then— “Bern? But isn’t that in Switzerland?”

Tooru tried to keep his face deadpan as he replied the affirmative, but he couldn't help the twitch in one brow.

“But… what’s in Swi— oh!” Another small silence followed this enlightenment, during which Tooru kept his eyes carefully and nonchalantly on the road before them. He didn’t want to see the look on Hinata’s face as he digested that information and made of it what he would, and certainly didn’t want Hinata to look at his own face as he was forced to capitulate to the boy’s inevitable demand to be taken back to Lisbon rather than continue on this madly impromptu international jaunt. 

“Okay, cool.” 

Tooru glanced at him in surprise, brow raised. Hinata was gazing through the windscreen at the rows of pine trees rushing past them, fingers tangled in his lap.

“Cool?”

“Well I said I wanted an adventure didn’t I?” Hinata laughed. “I’d be pretty silly if I turned one down when it fell into my lap, right?”

“Very,” Tooru agreed cordially, much to Hinata’s amusement. “Especially since I’m providing you with such uplifting acoustics,” he continued, gesturing at the stereo which was now spewing a Lewis Capaldi ballad which Tooru was frankly a little mortified to have on his Spotify.

“Hang on, I’ll change it.” Hinata reached down to where the phone was nestled in the slot beneath the stereo, but Tooru was quicker.

“Ah!” he chided in the manner of one scolding a dog, snagging the phone and glancing down to quickly flick through his playlists. 

When he eventually decided on one of Spotify’s own ‘top hits’ lists, he could feel Hinata’s pout levelled at him without even turning his head. “My car, my rules, remember?” 

“That’s super dangerous you know, you should leave me in charge of the music while you drive. Or let me drive and you play dj, my mum started teaching me to drive before I left and a manual can’t be that different from an automatic.” 

At that Tooru laughed a genuine, bright belly laugh that made the cold in his chest thaw a little. 

“Since neither of those things is happening while I’m alive, I suggest you sit there and look cute until we get to Salamanca, or put those fidgety fingers to good use and start researching hotels for us.” He glanced at Hinata out of the corner of one eye, a mischievous smile curving his lips as he saw the kid was equal parts flustered and indignant. “Good job, first part done, now you just need to get cracking on those reservations.” Hinata’s indignant squawk was outdone only by the loud blush which crept up his neck to his cheeks. 

Their conversation continued in much the same manner as they drew nearer to Salamanca, sporadic and light-hearted banter punctuated by comfortable silences and the occasional question about mutual acquaintances. As they turned off the A25 at a huge intersection by the city limits to follow the river into the centre of town, Tooru stifled another yawn and rubbed at his eyes. 

“Alright, navigator, lead the way to our sweet haven,” he sighed, grateful for the lateness only inasmuch as it guaranteed the streets were all but empty of traffic. Hinata pulled out his phone and started listing off directions to the ‘Hostal Gud’ —which Tooru very much hoped lived up to its name, despite being the cheapest they could find on such short notice —which were interrupted occasionally by jaw-cracking yawns. 

“Jeez, they never tell you how tiring adventures can be, do they?” Hinata grumbled one such display. 

“I don’t suppose they do, but any adventure where you don’t at least get a little uncomfortable isn’t really an adventure at all, is it. Besides, you’ll forget it all in the retelling, just you wait. Is it left here, or right?”

As they neared the Parque de la Alamedilla, which Google said was apparently right by their hostel, Hinata began humming distractedly along to a bop which had just come on the stereo. Jessie Reyes, if the abstract crush Tooru had on every Latina artist was correct. 

“Hey, why is she so happy talking about body counts?” Hinata asked suddenly. 

“Huh?”

“Well, I mean in the song she keeps saying that she doesn’t care about this guy’s body count, right? But a high body count isn’t something you can just not care about, is all I’m saying.” Tooru’s brow furrowed as he considered this. If he’d given it any thought he wouldn’t have expected Karasuno’s little red ten to be a Puritan. If that was the case they might not get on quite as well as he’d hoped, being himself possessed of a not insubstantial body count made up of both men and women. What could he say, he liked sex and at the same time didn’t like wallowing in an unrequited crush, both of which lent themselves to a high quota of happily satisfied partners. 

“I just mean,” Hinata barreled on after glancing at his frowning profile, “if you kill someone you shouldn’t really boast about it, right? Otherwise you’ll for sure get caught, plus it’s not a great thing to be killing people to begin with, so you know do you, but maybe don’t make a song about being okay with someone killing lots of people or some people will get the wrong idea.”

“Oh,” Tooru almost laughed; “she’s not talking about… you know what, never mind, you’re absolutely right.” 

God, for all his unsettling intuitive wisdom and the fact that he was only 2 years Tooru’s junior, Hinata was just so  _ young _ . He didn’t get the chance to think much more about it until much later as he lay on a lumpy single mattress on the top bunk of a 6-man dormitory; but as he turned onto his side and pillowed his head on his folded arms, he couldn’t help but wonder whether he would end up corrupting Hinata or whether he would instead inherit Hinata’s guileless naivety.

He secretly hoped it was the latter: rejuvenation could only be good for his skin.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

The following morning passed by unremarkably, although Hinata tried his best to remark on every other little thing until Tooru just had to laugh, think wistfully of noise-cancelling headphones, and drag him to the car before the afternoon went the same way. Hinata began dropping less and less subtle hints that he should be in charge of the music now he was part of the adventure, much to Tooru’s chagrin. By the time they merged into Madrid’s late afternoon traffic, Tooru had had to slap his hand away from the phone half a dozen times.

On the final time, he had seen the tell-tale movement out of the corner of his eye and had simply moved his hand into the path of Hinata’s own so that Hinata had inadvertently laced their fingers together as he tried to grasp for the phone. Tooru had clicked his tongue and pretended to croon condescendingly. “That’s awful sweet of you, shorty, but you’re a little young for me. Besides, I like mine dark.” Hinata had squeaked in flustered indignation but hadn’t tried again, so Tooru counted it as a win. 

“We’re making good time,” he said later as they sat eating kebabs on a park bench nearby their hostel. Once again because of the late notice they had only managed to find a couple of beds in a mixed dorm and when they had entered to find what seemed to be months’ worth of someone’s laundry hung out to dry on every available surface, they had agreed going forward to always book in advance. 

He had gotten off the phone some minutes before with the rental company who had been more than happy for him to rent their least profitable car for the next month, though, which was no small relief. Being left high and dry in the middle of Western Europe was on no-one’s list of top-ten adventures.

“We should be into France in a few days,” he continued, “then it’s a pretty straight shot up to Bern.”

“Do we go through Italy at all?” Hinata asked around a mouthful of questionable doner meat, and Tooru wrinkled his nose in distaste. 

“No, it’s not on the way. Why, did you want to go to Italy?”

“Well, I heard Nishinoya was in Viareggio, so if that’s kind of on the way I was thinking it would be super cool to see him again I haven’t seen him since he took off around the world straight after graduation.”

“Your libero?” Tooru guessed, dredging through his memory to find the face attached to the familiar name. 

“Mhmm,” Hinata hummed happily, balling up the foil of his kebab and wiping his mouth on his sleeve like an oversized kid. 

“It’s not too far, so if we stick to the coast through France and Italy it should only take a couple days more.”

They sat in silence for a few moments more, both idly watching a group of teenagers kicking a soccer ball between themselves. 

“Hey, what happened to the other Seijoh third years after graduation?” Hinata asked suddenly. 

“Huh? Well, Mattsun— that’s the tall middle blocker with the dark hair—he works at a daycare centre, and Makki, who was our wing spiker, actually just had a kid of his own and opened a business in the same year, because apparently he’s a glutton for punishment.” 

Hinata laughed. “And you said Iwaizumi plays for Daichi’s team, right?” 

“Yeah.” Tooru’s throat bobbed. “He wanted to go to California to study sports science because he didn’t think he’d be good enough for the V-league but we managed to convince him to try out. Turns out he was.”

“Ok, so… I get that the European beach league is huge and all, but I guess I’m just a little surprised you’d be all the way over here by yourself and not in the Japanese V-league too, I don't think I ever saw you guys apart. Besides, if Daichi and Iwaizumi could get in I know you’d definitely be able to.”

It wasn’t exactly a question, and Tooru was tempted to treat it as such by not replying or by thanking him with bad grace for the compliment. He knew the kid would just take it as sincere gratitude, though, and it was no fun mocking someone who didn’t know they were being mocked. 

Beyond that... Tooru didn’t want to treat his injury as if it was a dirty secret. He’d gotten hurt and there was no shame in that; plenty of professional athletes had had similar injuries and had made it back into competitive leagues to have long and successful careers. 

The mantra was as familiar as breathing, learned by rote and etched into his psyche. 

“I hurt my knee on the hard court so my options were surgery, which could potentially end my career; no surgery, which would definitely end my career; or recuperation on the soft court to let it heal. I’m sure you can guess which one I took.”

Hinata nodded sagely, eyes a little unfocused as he stared into a memory. “That must have been a tough choice to make,” he said finally.

“It was the only choice,” Tooru said with finality, trying to cut off any sympathy and pity before it could manifest on the younger man’s face. 

“That kinda makes it worse though, doesn't it? I mean, I got to make the choice to come here; you came here because it was the only option to save your knee. It just seems kinda unfair you didn’t get to play in the V-league with your friend.” 

Tooru frowned slightly. “It doesn’t matter what’s fair. It just matters what is. Every choice you make has consequences, and if you don’t make any choice at all that will still have an impact. Make no mistake, though,” he said, standing and turning back to the hostel after depositing his trash in the bin, “I will play in the V-league, I won’t get left behind, and I’ll be the one left standing on the court.” By the look in Hinata’s eyes he thought he and the kid had that conviction in common.

xxx

They briefly debated staying in Madrid for a couple of days, but as neither of them was particularly taken with the terracotta grandeur of the nation’s capital, they decided to push on and save the wiggle room in their schedule until they were feeling a little more fatigued. 

A few days later though, when they finally hit the coastline again near Barcelona, Tooru was beginning to seriously question his decision not to simply catch a plane. Certainly, the daily drive through the countryside was lovely, and there had been some views which had taken his breath away. But there was also only so much small-talk to be made in a confined space for hours at a time with someone you had never known very well —or at all. 

For the most part, it seemed that Hinata was content to talk about himself and his team, or to hum tunelessly along to the music, but on rare occasions he would ask questions. When this happened, Toor became the unerring subject of his intense earnest eye-contact. Thank god he had the excuse of watching the road.

Tooru got the impression that Hinata was trying to figure him out, that he wasn’t yet fully understood, which was perfectly fine by him. The more he spoke about himself though, about his past and his future, the more Hinata seemed comfortable asking him. As someone who had learned to guard his vulnerable core closely and fiercely against all but one, Tooru was almost constantly on guard against his sneak-attack questions. 

As a consequence, Tooru had to fight to keep the terseness out of his voice. He tried to bite his tongue, reminding himself that his feeling like a dog whose hair was being rubbed up the wrong way was his own problem and not Hinata’s fault. All the same, one afternoon after a particularly rapid-fire batch of questions, a momentary lapse of control led him to snap out an annoyed “What’s with all the damn questions, Christ, are you my mother?” 

As soon as he said it he regretted having let his temper get the better of him, and wished he could just eat up the words from where they hung in the air between them. Hinata, for his part, took it in his stride; the only indication he was chagrined lay in how he curled a little tighter on the seat. 

They had been silent for a while after that, before Hinata had resumed talking about his top ten anime as if nothing had happened. He didn’t ask as many questions, and as a result Tooru felt himself slip more and more into his own head. 

As they neared the end of the work-week, Tooru was growing ever more tired of his own company on the long drives. When not constantly entertained or diverted he had a habit of overthinking, and when this lead him to the constant chant of _whatifhedoesn’tcareanymore_ the prospect was gruelling. 

At least Hinata looked like he was enjoying himself again, gazing out the window with rapture whenever he wasn’t engaged in trying to get Tooru to play some of his songs. He would ask questions occasionally, about the towns they passed through or the language spoken in the country they were crossing or even about the people Tooru had met who came from places like these. 

Tooru would answer when he could, and when he couldn’t would get his phone out at a rest stop and google the answer for both of them, his own silent apology for earlier in the week. They tried to spend as much time outdoors walking around the towns as they could when not driving, neither of them enjoying the monotony of motel walls, but again there was only so much to be said to someone who was neither a friend nor a peer. 

One late afternoon as they neared the Spanish-French border, Hinata exclaimed as if he’d just thought of it, “Oh! Are we going to see the Eiffel Tower if we’re going through France? Am I going to get to see Paris? I’ve always wanted to see Paris! Natsu is going to be so jealous—that’s my sister—she’s going through that phase that all girls seem to go through where they think it’s the most romantic city in the world and they think they’re going to meet their soulmate there like French men just wander around with their croissants and berets waiting for dorky teenage girls to fall at their feet.” 

He paused to laugh at his own joke, and Tooru didn’t have the heart to tell him that, from what he’d seen of the Frenchmen he had played with, that’s exactly what they did.

But as Hinata stopped to draw breath, Tooru jumped in to stop him before he got too carried away. “Paris is all the way in the north, so I don’t think we’d have the time to go there and come back to Viareggio to see Nishinoya before we’d have to be in Bern. Sorry, kid.” 

He couldn’t help but feel bad as he watched Hinata deflate. “Look, you’re not stuck with me, okay? I could drop you off in Paris if you really wanted to go then continue on my own, I’m not going to be the one to tear your or Natsu’s dreams down.”

Hinata was already shaking his head. “No way, first rule of adventuring is to always see it through to the end. I’m coming with you to Bern to see Kageyama, and Daichi of course; there’s always time for more adventures later, and maybe I can even take her with me if she promises not to be gross and talk about boys. Besides,” he perked up and leaned forward in his seat, hands under his thighs, “you must be super keen to see Iwaizumi again since it’s probably been ages since you guys were together. I get that you want to get to Bern as quickly as possible.”

Something swooped low in Tooru’s stomach. He had, in fact, had a video chat with Hajime that morning, the nondescript brown wallpaper of their motel room providing a useful backdrop to disguise his true location. It had been short, since he’d caught Hajime just before afternoon practice, and although they’d bickered and teased as they always had, it had felt shallower than usual, more like following a script, and Tooru’s heart sank lower as he realised the distance between them was as great as ever. 

Hajime had been distracted and a little cagey about practice and, although Tooru could guess the reason behind it, he hadn’t been able to get it out of his best friend. In hindsight, he himself had probably been just as cagey about his plans post-championship since he couldn’t exactly have said ‘ _to see you, you big dummy, because I miss you like I’d miss my own heart if it got ripped out’_ , so they had no doubt both hung up feeling less fulfilled than before the call.

In that respect Hinata had been right, but not in the way he imagined. 

Now that Tooru thought about it, the idea of standing in front of Hajime felt a little like standing in front of St Peter waiting to be judged for his sins, and quite frankly it made him sick with nerves. Maybe he should say they had time to go to Paris after all, draw out this whole affair as long as possible to delay the inevitable.

They had planned to stop in Montpellier, but the sun had only just begun to kiss the tops of buildings when they arrived in the city an hour later, and Tooru still felt too wound up to call it a day. 

“Hey, do you want to try push on to Marseille tonight rather than stop at Montpellier? We still have enough light and one ‘M’ is as good as another in my opinion.” 

Hinata startled and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “Are you sure it’s not too late...?” he began hesitatingly, but Tooru brushed him off. 

“What’s good in Montpellier, anyway; I say we aim for Marseille and if we need to we can stop in Nîmes or Aix-en-Provence.” Hinata shrugged, but Tooru felt his eyes on his profile for the next few kilometres. Even when he went back to staring raptly out the window, he remained silent and still, like a man lost deep in thought.

Unfortunately this meant that Tooru was once again cast adrift in the tumult of his own mind, and although he’d have appreciated a diversion he certainly wasn’t about to appeal to a near-stranger for one. As they approached Nîmes, the first wave of Tooru’s jittery energy had subsided and his eyes began to feel gritty and slow. 

He thought about just calling it and asking Hinata to look for accomodation for the night. When a slow and heavy late-night beat dropped on the stereo as they entered the city limits, though, Tooru exhaled in frustration through his nose.

Paolo Nutini’s _One Day_ had the type of melody you’d listen to dancing cheek-to-cheek with a lover long after the crowd had left, but the words were nothing but heartache. The tired pressure behind his eyes threatened to transform into a tension headache, and he pressed his palm into an eye socket with more force than necessary until one eye could see nothing but stars. 

Today was the first day of June, the month of Hajime’s birth, and if things didn’t change this would be the first one they spent apart barring the first four of their lives. Then if things continued not to change through July, it would be the first of Tooru’s that they didn’t spend together, either, then the first Christmas, repeat ad nauseum. 

The worst part was that neither of them was doing anything about it, too afraid to pull on the jagged edges in case the whole Jenga tower came tumbling down.

God but he was being dramatic, Tooru thought angrily as he took the corner leaving the town a little faster than was perhaps wise. Maybe he was a fool to want more of Hajime than the kisses they had shared before Hajime had told him he wouldn’t follow him to Europe or wait for him in Japan. A fool and a joke. 

He was a grown man with a heart that didn’t even belong to him, bravely driving across a continent to confront the man he couldn’t get out of his head while wishing that the drive would never end so he wouldn’t have to. He would laugh if he wasn’t so busy grinding his teeth.

“I know I’m not supposed to ask,” Hinata broke into his thoughts, and Tooru was so startled to hear him talk he let out a little huff of warm air. He had forgotten for a second that he wasn’t alone, and he scrambled to pull the perfect mask back down over his features before he could be read like an open book. “—I know I’m not supposed to ask, but did you leave someone back home too? Someone you think of when you hear songs like this?”

Tooru choked on his instinctive denial, trying instead to turn it into an incredulous laugh. “W-what?”

“It’s just that you get this look when your phone plays sad songs like you’re not really looking at what’s in front of you,” Hinata hurried on, “and I know I’m not meant to ask but after how you looked just now I thought maybe you needed to talk about it because it looks like it’s eating you up inside and—”

“I don’t.” 

“Okay.”

“Not because I don't want to talk about it, but because there’s nothing to talk about.”

Hinata nodded, eyes a little too knowing.

“I don’t think of anyone when I hear these songs, they’re just sad songs, you’re _supposed_ to feel sad.” God, shut up Tooru.

“I understand.”

He clamped his lips together on the urge to keep babbling and stared straight ahead, steadfastly ignoring the furtive glances he could feel Hinata sending him. 

“I’m sorry, Oikawa, I didn’t mean to make you mad, let’s forget I said anything.”

Tooru sighed through his nose. “I’m not mad, you’re fine. I’m just sorry to disappoint, no one special’s waiting for me anywhere.”

“Right,” Hinata said, after a little pause that practically screamed _that’s not what I asked, though, was it_ . Tooru’s nostrils flared. _God_ , what was with these Karasuno punks and getting under his skin? He didn’t know what kind of black magic this kid was channeling but Tooru was getting real sick of being _seen_ like this. He resolved not to get sucked into conversation with him again until they had at least cleared the range of hills in the Parc naturel régional des Alpilles, giving his traitorous mouth a much-needed time out.

“Get some sleep, we just need to clear the range and then it’s just over an hour to Marseille.” 

Hinata hummed assent and tucked his legs beneath him. “Are you going to be ok to drive that long?” he questioned on a yawn.

“Sure, what’s an hour on interesting road.”

After a half hour of sharp turns and steep ascents up sheer rocky hill faces, Tooru realised that an hour was in fact a hell of a long damn time. The terrain was challenging and should have kept him on his toes but he couldn’t seem to shake the tiredness weighing down his eyelids. 

It was more emotional depletion than physical exhaustion, since they had done little more than sit in a car for the last five days. All the same, as the blinding flash of a truck’s headlights jolted him back to himself, he realised it didn’t make much difference when you were driving a station wagon older than yourself up a mountain road frequented by traffic much heavier than you.

The thing was that he didn’t want to stop just now, because to pull over now meant they would be sleeping side by side in the back of this bucket of bolts. It was a cosy arrangement for a single adult male, and for two it would be a tight fit to put it mildly. 

Normally he had no problem lying that close to another warm male body, but the thought of lying next to this one, one whose knowing eyes had been seeing through him from the first night they’d spent drinking together, made him feel unbearably vulnerable. He felt as if he was constantly being watched and evaluated— not maliciously, but in that quiet, sure way of someone who knew that by observing you they’d come to know you in the end. 

He was also terrified of what the kid knew about Hajime. He may be the only person on this side of the world who would automatically connect Tooru with Hajime in his mind, and if he saw through Tooru’s masks to the battered heart beneath, maybe he would begin to question why Tooru was so loath to talk about his best friend. 

It was one thing knowing that his relationship with the only person who mattered was deteriorating, and that there was seemingly nothing he could do about it, but it was quite another to admit it out loud to a near-stranger.

If only he could keep driving a little longer, they would reach Marseille and he could avoid that particular judgment day altogether.

He glanced across the console where Hinata sat curled up in his favourite position with his back propped against the door. His cheek lolled against the headrest and his breaths were calm, although not deep enough to be in true deep sleep just yet. He looked calm and peaceful, comfortable and warm wrapped up in his hoodie in a way Tooru was decidedly not, sitting stiffly with his cold fingers clamped on the wheel. 

Gaze returning to the road, Tooru let his fingers relax a little and allowed the tightness in his shoulders to ease. He slouched down in his seat, one hand coming to the back of his neck to knead at the taut muscles ineffectually. If he could just close his eyes for a second, he’d be fine he knew. Just a blink, a momentary rest then he’d snap back to it, maybe give himself a few slaps to wake himself up. He was just so tired… 

The deafening foghorn of a truck cut through the haze in his mind, and in a millisecond he was more alert than he’d ever been in his life. On instinct, one hand clamped onto the steering wheel and yanked it to the right to veer out of the path of the oncoming road train, while the other flew out to his right to grab Hinata’s shirt and stop him flying off the seat. The kid was definitely awake now, and in the back of his mind Tooru heard him draw in a ragged breath as the headlights flashed by Tooru’s window and the horn receded behind them. 

Luckily, his instinct hadn’t quite been good enough to tell his foot to stomp on the brakes, otherwise they would have skidded and spun out on the loose stones strewn all over the road. He had taken his foot off the accelerator though, and now slowly coasted the car to a stop on a shoulder of the road where a rocky outcrop jutted out, fingers still clamped in Hinata’s shirtfront. 

Slowly, he made himself release his death grip on both Hinata and the wheel, hand moving to turn off the engine as they sat frozen in silence staring straight ahead. 

After a few moments, Tooru managed to inhale deep enough to release some of the iron bands around his chest.

“When your life flashed before your eyes just then, did you see me naked? Be honest now.”

Hinata let out a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a sob and slumped in his seat. “If- if I had I’d know for sure I was dead.”

“Because you’d be in heaven?”

“N-no, I meant because I’d be in hell!” 

They finally turned to face each other, and Tooru was quite sure that the wide-eyed glassy look in Hinata’s eyes was a mirror of his own. Deer in headlights, indeed.

“So I think maybe—” Hinata began.

“—We sleep here for the night?” Tooru finished, and Hinata nodded shakily. 

As one, they locked the doors and clambered over the rear seats to tumble into the back, unanimously realising they didn’t want to leave the safety of the cab. Tooru had packed a small fluffy turquoise blanket which he’d bought during the first few days after arriving in Portugal’s winter, and he now pulled it free and crawled beneath it. Hinata pulled his hoodie more firmly beneath his chin and crossed his arms over his chest, following Tooru’s lead in stuffing his pack beneath his head to act as a pillow. 

As their eyes began to adjust to the low light of the half moon, Tooru risked a glance at his companion from the corner of his eye to find that Hinata was still staring with wide unblinking eyes up at the roof. He opened his mouth, unsure if he was going to ask if he was okay or simply wish him goodnight, but before he could do either another truck drove past them. The combination of the thunder from the wheels and the whoosh of air as it passed their rest stop caused Hinata to jerk bodily in fright and squeeze his eyes shut.

Tooru sighed and shook his head at himself. He had been so fixated on the ageless perceptiveness of the kid and his own fear of becoming vulnerable that he had forgotten the most important part: that Hinata _was_ still a kid, for all intents and purposes, and that he had made himself vulnerable for Tooru’s consumption many times over already. 

Tooru had almost caused a horror smash by falling asleep at the wheel, and had known the kid was deeply affected by it, but despite this had been considering a moment ago going to sleep without checking to see if he was okay. Hot shame licked up his insides like flames. 

Sometimes, he knew, he got so caught up in his own head that he forgot other people weren’t pawns in a game. Normally he would have Hajime by his side to remind him that his was only one tiny universe among many, but in his absence Tooru figured he had to just suck it up and be better all by himself. 

“Are you okay?” There was about an inch of space between them so Tooru didn’t feel Hinata flinch, but he heard his stifled sniffle. 

“Um,” Hinata began, then broke off to swallow thickly. “Yeah, I’m okay. Or maybe a little shaken up? I guess I’ll be okay, is more the truth. I just need to go to sleep and I’ll be fine, but I can’t seem to close my eyes.”

“I’m sorry for scaring you.”

At that he felt Hinata’s eyes slide to his face, but he kept his eyes forward. “You don’t apologise much. Usually you just say you didn’t mean to do something.”

At that, he did turn to meet Hinata’s eyes. “I suppose you’re right,” he said after a beat. “I guess I’m sorry for that too, then.”

Hinata laughed softly and a little wetly. “I get it. You just don’t like people getting close.”

Tooru blinked and clenched his fist, fighting the urge to snark. He owed it to Hinata to be better than that.

They lay in silence for a few moments more, not quite touching but able to feel the comforting heat radiating off of one another. Tooru ground his teeth, debating the wisdom of his next move. As another truck rumbled past though, the glare of the headlights casting eerie bands of light onto the roof, he felt Hinata cringe and instinctively curl towards him and he cursed in his head. 

“There… was someone for me,” he began hesitantly, testing the weight of the words on his tongue. “Someone I left behind, I mean, that I think about when I hear sad songs.” And happy songs, and cheesy songs, and no songs at all.

Hinata didn’t say anything, but the silence wasn’t uninviting. 

“We were perfect as friends, then we were even better as a couple, but when I decided to play in the Portuguese league it just kinda fell apart. I wanted them to come, but they said they couldn’t. Then when I asked them to wait, they said they didn’t want to.” 

He wanted to shrug and fall back into silence, but the sound of Hinata’s even breaths in the dark, calmer now and deeper, spurred him on. 

“So now here I am six months later still thinking about them, and you tell me that if after a couple of weeks you don’t think about someone maybe it’s just that it’s not meant to be. Does that mean that if you do, then it is? What am I meant to do with that information?” 

“Do you still talk to them?” Hinata asked softly.

“Yeah. But it’s not the same, there’s always this monster or alien or something sitting on my shoulder, like if I were to say the wrong thing it’d come out and wreck whatever I’d managed to rebuild so far. It’s like when no matter how good of a set I send up, there’s always a block in the way.”

“Isn’t it also the spiker’s job to dodge the block though?”

“Yeah, but what kind of setter am I if I can’t create a path for my spiker to follow?” When he realised what he had just said, Tooru froze.

There was a beat of silence, then Hinata’s next words fell like a death knell. “It’s Iwaizumi, isn’t it?”

Tooru’s breath staggered out of his chest. He had fought so hard for so long to suppress those very words that he felt surely there had to be some physical reaction to their finally being spoken, like a lightning bolt or thunder clap. As if he were that important to the universe. 

Again, his natural instinct was to deny and divert, and this time he didn’t fight against it.

“I was speaking hypothetically, I didn’t mean one of my actual spikers.”

“I didn’t think it was Iwaizumi because you were talking about spikers,” Hinata stated plainly, once again cutting through his bullshit. “I thought it was Iwaizumi because of the way you look when you talk about him in general, and the way you look whenever I talk about him to you. To be honest, I thought the two of you were together even in high school because of how you played together. It was like Kageyama always said: there was this, like, telepathic connection between you that meant you could tell what the other was thinking from just a look.”

Tooru squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw. He felt like a neonate, laid bare and scrubbed raw under the intense scrutiny of someone he couldn’t hide from. Maybe this had been a mistake, maybe he should have kept his mouth shut rather than letting Hinata in. 

But— no, that was his goblin brain talking, the one that had wanted to lash out at Tobio for getting into his space. Hinata deserved his honesty; he wouldn’t hold it against Tooru and mock him, he wouldn’t smirk or laugh at him, he understood, didn’t he?

“I think you need to be kinder to yourself.” 

“Eh?” Whatever he had expected Hinata to say next, that wasn’t it.

“Well, I mean, you’re literally driving across like five countries to surprise him, but you basically just told me that you don’t think you’re doing enough to show him how you feel. Plus, I think you’re forgetting that he’s a person too, and that he has to choose to meet you halfway—not literally though, I don’t even know where halfway is between Portugal and Switzerland—otherwise it’s always going to be unfair on you.” 

“Didn’t you hear what I said,” Tooru said from where he’d tucked his head beneath the blanket. “He made his position clear when he told me I could go to Portugal to start my career, but if I did then I’d be going alone.”

“Yeah, but that was before you disappeared from his life for six months. Do you really think his life hasn’t been any different with you gone?” 

Tooru wasn’t so sure, judging by the Instagram activity he saw from time to time featuring a decidedly unmelancholic Hajime, but he decided it was best to not bare all of his neuroses in one sitting. 

As he pondered how to respond to Hinata’s rhetorical question, though, a wave of exhaustion hit him. He had avoided thinking about this for so many months that finally talking about it as if it were an everyday topic of conversation had worn out the last of his energy. That, and the aftereffects of his massive spike of adrenaline from earlier, had turned his muscles to so many fuzzy pieces of string.

Tooru sighed, shifting slightly so he could brush his arm against his companion’s. He was no longer jittery, but there was still a certain latent tension in his muscles. Without meeting his eyes, Tooru grabbed the edge of his blanket and threw it over Hinata before rolling away to face the window.

“Oh, I’m not cold anymore, you don’t need to—”

“I know you’re not cold, Hinata, it’s summer in the Mediterranean. Your hands are still shaking, though, so shut up, bundle up and go to sleep.”

There was a small huff which could be amusement, then Hinata drew in a breath. 

“Can you— Shouyou.”

“What?”

“It’s— it’s my name. Would you call me it?”

“Only if you go to sleep. Shouyou,” he added after a beat.

His eyes began to droop and he felt the heaviness of sleep settle onto his chest, but just before he dozed off to the sound of a car somewhere in the hills above them, he felt fingers twitching the material at his back.

“Is— is this okay?” Shouyou asked sleepily, latching his hand more firmly onto the back of his shirt. Tooru hummed his acquiescence, not caring as long as it got the kid to wind down and go to sleep. He was rewarded after another few minutes when the last thing he heard before sleep finally pulled him under was the quietest snore at his back. 

xxx

Tooru woke early enough the following morning that mist was still hanging heavy around the car, painting pictures on it in dewdrops. He lay still for a moment listening to the rhythmic breathing of his bedmate before the recollections of last night’s confessions slammed into him, causing him to cringe and cover his face with his arms in visceral mortification. 

He couldn’t believe he had shared that much of himself with a stranger, an ex-rival to boot, and he wished for a moment that he could reach back in time and eat up the words that had spilled from him like tea from a soggy tea bag.

But then as he uncovered his eyes cautiously, he saw Hinata’s hand reaching out towards him, and remembered him asking Tooru in a small voice to be kinder to himself, and to call him _Shouyou_ , and he thought maybe he’d done alright. 

Still, the energy thrumming through his veins wasn’t going to go away without one of two activities. The first would get him into serious trouble if Shouyou woke up before he was finished, so the second option it was. He sighed and slid out from beneath the fuzzy Aoba Johsai-blue blanket, slipping some running shorts and a fresh t-shirt from his bag to change into outside under cover of the heavy mist.

Before he departed for a short run further along the stretch of road they would take later that morning, he wrote a quick message — _gone running_ —on the dewy car window, confident he’d be back before the sun was up far enough to burn it away.

The longer he was out in the wet morning air, heavy footfalls muffled by the blanket of mist wrapped around him, the more resigned he became to his decisions of the previous night. Not only could he not take back what he had told Shouyou, but as long as he could keep his head in a good space he wouldn’t want to.

That he was gone on Hajime was to him a given, a fact as obvious as the nose on his face, though perhaps not as red from the cold morning air. To Shouyou, though, he wasn’t sure how the revelation seemed, wasn’t sure how the younger man would react towards him now he’d given him a big piece of the Tooru puzzle.

But— and he reminded himself of this for what must have been the millionth time, the words practically imprinted behind his eyes— he couldn’t control what others thought of him; he could only control himself. Maybe the kid would still be asleep when he got back and he could start the car and take them away from the rawness of the clifftop before he even woke.

As it was, Shouyou had only just begun to stir by the time Tooru returned to the car, sweating and puffing but much clearer in mind. He opened the boot of the car and sat on the lip as Shouyou stretched and levered himself into an upright position. Despite the comparative clarity of his mind after the run, Tooru still wasn’t set on how to approach Shouyou, unsure if he would expect the same level of openness. Maybe they would even end up braiding each other’s hair.

“If we get going soon we’ll hit the beach before the sun’s fully risen and we can have a swim before breakfast,” he said to cover his uncertainty. “The beaches aren’t as good as in Portugal, but we can’t be too choosy for day-trippers.”

Shouyou rubbed his eyes and wrinkled his brow. “Swim? Don’t you need a shower though?” 

“Are you saying I stink, Shouyou?” he bated, the jibe falling easily from his lips. “Is that any way to talk to your senpai?” The younger man’s eyes shot open and he flushed, suddenly wide awake.

“N-no, that’s not what I meant! I just mean you’re all sweaty and I thought you might want—” Tooru laughed as his kouhai stumbled over his apologies, waving a dismissive hand.

“You’re stuck with me like this for another hour, then we can use the showers at the beach to wash off since our chariot is lacking certain basic amenities. I was thinking we could try reach the Italian border today, but if we’re not feeling up to it then Nice is just short of that, and it’s a pretty enough town to keep us entertained for the night.” 

As they continued to plan, Tooru felt the tension lift from his shoulders. Fundamentally they were the same, save for his divestment of maybe a few layers of masks. The difference now was that when they caught each other’s eye, they would smile or pull faces before looking away. 

“Wait, does this mean I get to pick the music?” Shouyou exclaimed excitedly as they changed into clean clothes in the car park of a Marseille beach. 

“On a cold day in hell,” Tooru snarked back, raising one imperious brow. 

“But,” he continued after a couple of minutes as they pulled back out into traffic, croissants in hand, “I guess it means you can call me Tooru. If the spirit takes you.” 

Shouyou nodded coolly, flipping his sunglasses down over his eyes, but Tooru smirked when out of the corner of his eye he saw the kid silently fist-pump to himself.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very excited that y’all are still enjoying and giving me such lovely feedback :) The chapter count has been updated now I’ve gone through and actually divided the rest of the work up, so we’re just about half-way through woo!   
> Warning for some light oikawa x omc in this chapter, them boys do be horny

They passed through the rest of France and entered into Italy with very little intrigue to interrupt the lazy, sunny drives along the coastline. Tooru had compromised on the playlist by allowing Shouyou to veto one song per day, as well as letting him submit some of his favourite artists for Tooru’s perusal. 

Otherwise, they spent the warm mornings with the windows down driving along winding coastal roads, and the evenings wandering around unfamiliar locales filled with extraordinary and extraordinarily foreign sights and smells. The beautiful tranquility and culture of plenty made it hard not to feel buoyed by levity and, with a conscious effort not to think about the future, Tooru let himself bask in the contentment. 

One such early afternoon, as they passed through Genoa with Kylie Minogue, of all things, blaring through the tinny speakers in the VW, Tooru drew in a deep breath and began to sing along. In between watching the heat mirage flicker over the asphalt of the road, he cast his eyes out over the sweeping white bay beneath them, decorated by clusters of colourful beach umbrellas. On days like this, he thought to himself, he could almost believe he was where he was meant to be. 

Shouyou snorted in amusement as he began gesturing and miming along with the lyrics — _ feels like it is now or never, don’t wanna be alone  _ —but as he cranked up the volume until it was all they could hear and held out a hand as if he were holding an invisible microphone, the younger man laughed in delight and began to sing along too. With each chorus they became louder and less coordinated, until they were singing at the top of their lungs and jumping around so much in the limited space allowed by their seatbelts that the whole car rocked. 

Only when their route took them past the local police station, and several of the officers leaning on their cars in the forecourt stood up straighter in interest to watch them drive past, did Tooru crank down the volume and flop, breathless from laughter, back in his chair. 

He glanced across at where Shouyou was engrossed in his phone, grinning ear to ear in a way that didn’t bode well for anyone of sound mind. “What are you looking at?” he asked warily.

“Hmm? Oh, I took a Snapchat video and Daichi just sent me a funny message. He asked if you’d kidnapped me, then when I said you were making me dance for my supper he asked if he needed to sic Iwaizumi on you. Wh-what?” This last was because he had glanced up from his phone screen to see Tooru staring at him like he had two heads.

“You. Let me get this straight. You filmed us dancing to Kylie Minogue, in a car, together. And sent it to Sawamura?”

“Um, yes?” 

“This would be the same Sawamura who is on the same team as the man I am currently driving halfway around Europe to surprise?”

“Um,” Shouyou gulped, “yes?”

Tooru inhaled deeply through his nose, nostrils flaring as he fought to quell his first instinct to throttle the kid. “What,” he asked with faux calm, “made you think that was a good idea? What possible explanation could we give that would explain this little escapade we’ve got going on here?” He felt a bubble of panic grow in his chest. If Hajime found out he was on his way to Switzerland to see him, Tooru was certain he’d be getting an annoyed phone call telling him  _ not to be an idiot, there’s no way you’re driving all the way to Switzerland, go home Shittykawa there’s no need for you to meet me there why are you coming anyways? _

“Oh, I didn’t have to make up an excuse or anything, Daichi already guessed we were driving to meet up with them in Bern when I said we were road tripping together. He said he might even be able to get some of the others who are doing their overseas experience nearby to come out so we can have a proper reunion!” 

Tooru let out a strangled sound as his hands clamped down onto the steering wheel until he was white-knuckling the brown vinyl.

“Ah, but I see that’s not the part you were worried about, right. Don’t worry, I'll tell him not to tell Iwaizumi we’re coming, that way it’ll still be a secret.” 

“Wha- don’t do that oh my God how are you this perceptive and this  _ dumb _ ?” He reached out to snatch the phone from Shouyou’s grasp, causing the car to veer slightly before he righted it in the lane. 

When he glanced down at the screen, he saw with chagrin that Shouyou had already sent the message, and he took his eyes off the road for a second to shoot a death glare at the guilty grimace that reminded him a lot of a dog in trouble. 

Before either could say anything more, Tooru felt the phone vibrate in his hand and instinctively looked down to read the incoming message.

<<Dadchi<<

11:39am

_ Don’t worry I figured that’s why you guys were coming. Tell him not to worry his secret is safe with me ;)  _

11:39am

_ But don’t actually tell him that OMG. It’ll be an interesting reunion though, I’m almost surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. Probably best if we plan a bar trip and leave them to it. _

Whatever  _ that  _ meant. Tooru was almost tempted to text back and ask, but he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. He didn’t have the time to think too deeply on it, though, because Shouyou was making grabby hands and trying to snatch his phone back, whining Tooru’s name imploringly. He pushed the messages deep into the back of his mind into the box labeled ‘Hajime Iwaizumi —enter at own risk’ and focused his attention back on his companion.

“No, you know what, you’re banned while you think on your sins,” he said in his best Uncle voice, tossing the phone carelessly onto the back seat. “This serves you right for being a brat and videoing me dancing.”

He didn’t expect Shouyou to listen to his decree, but he made no effort to reach back and retrieve his phone, instead huffing a laugh and poking his tongue out at Tooru.

“God, I need a drink,” Tooru sighed, merging onto the outbound highway that would carry them away from the brightly-coloured town. 

They made it one more town down the coast before Tooru decided unilaterally that it was time for them to stop for the day. They found a vacant campground with adequate amenities and booked a plot for the night, having decided between them since their night on the hilltop that sleeping in the car when possible was much cheaper than renting beds. Then, after dropping off their antique ride and stretching their backs free of knots from its dreadful seats, Tooru retrieved the volleyball he had dropped behind the front seat and held it up, eyebrows raised in invitation. 

The wattage of Shouyou’s smile could have put stadium spotlights to shame.

So it was that they whiled away the rest of the afternoon tossing the ball back and forth, sweaty and covered in sand head to toe within the first few plays. They collected other players occasionally and sometimes had enough to form teams and play real games before their teammates would again wander off. Tooru taught Shouyou how to watch the movements of the other team to discern their game plan without letting them read yours from your own movements, and in turn Shouyou let Tooru practice Tobio’s brand of direct delivery quick attack until they were breathless and ecstatically red-faced. 

Both of them being of the disposition to make friends easily, they eventually collected a group of young people who seemed inclined to linger a while longer. When the sun began to set late in the evening and the group started making noises about moving on, one young man piped up and assured them they didn’t need to go too far just yet. His friends, he said, were setting up a bonfire just up the beach and would be happy to meet new friends, even better if those friends were happy to bring a bottle along too. 

Tooru grinned and accepted, not yet wanting the night to be over and happy with the cheerful distraction. 

“<We’ll just go shower and find some booze first,>” he called out in English, which seemed to be the only common language, and pulled Shouyou up the bank of beach grass towards the car. “<We’ll meet you later, okay?>” 

“Are we really getting alcohol?” Shouyou asked curiously as they stood under the cool spray of the beach-side showers in nothing but their underwear. The mineral-rich water would play havoc with his hair, Tooru knew, pulling his fingers roughly through the wet strands, but he figured they could allow themselves the luxury of hotels for the next few nights to make up for it. It didn’t seem that the beach-swept look suited him too badly anyway, if the attention he was getting from a group of girls nearby was anything to go by.

“Sure. Well I mean, I am, but if you don't want to then you don’t have to. Your call.”

“No I’m definitely coming with you, this is like peak adventuring!” 

“Ah, of course, how could I be so unwise,” Tooru murmured as he shut off the shower and opened the car door to create a small buffer against the beach and faced inwards to afford himself some privacy as he changed.

“I just mean it feels like I’d have to sneak around like Kronk from that movie with the llamas,” Shouyou continued, following him back to the car. “You know, all secretive and clandestine, since I’m not 20 yet.” 

“You realise the legal drinking age for beer and wine in Italy is 16 right? For most of Europe, actually. Some places it’s 18 for spirits, but either way you’re in the clear.” He reached out to pat Shouyou bracingly on the shoulder. “You’re your own man, Sho, do with it what you will.” 

“Oh I hadn’t thought of it like— OH MY GOD Tooru please put some pants on what the heck!” 

Tooru laughed, stepping out of his wet underwear and hanging them alongside his beach clothes on the lip of the car window. He hadn’t bothered to wrap a towel around his waist and shimmy his clothes off and on as Shouyou had. Instead he took a moment to tease his brick-red companion by turning to him in confusion, standing fully nude before him as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do —though arguably it was — before finally capitulating and pulling on his dry clothes. 

“You’re so weird,” Shouyou grumbled, finally catching up with Tooru as he walked towards the service station down the street. “The Great King, more like the pervert king.”

“Great, huh? Did you really think it was that big?” 

“Oh my  _ God _ !” Shouyou squeaked again, smacking Tooru’s upper arm in mortification. His whole face was aflame now, and Tooru felt a little guilty baiting him purely because his reactions were always so exaggerated. “ _ Oh _ my God!”

“Okay, I’m sorry I’m sorry,” Tooru laughed, shielding himself from further blows to his arms and chest. “I’m sorry, I promise I’ll stop, look, how about I shout you tonight to make it up to you, any alcohol you want, okay?”

The hail of weak blows stopped. “Any?”

“Sure,” Tooru confirmed. Even so, a little uneasiness crept over him as they entered the shop, unsure as he was whether Shouyou would really take him up on his word: Tooru himself would have done if their positions were reversed. When Shouyou made a beeline straight for the display of cherry-flavoured vodka cruisers, Tooru realised he should have put more faith in Shouyou’s 19-year-old instincts. 

When some minutes later they arrived at the cove where their party awaited them, lit by a roaring bonfire like a beacon in the dark, Tooru tossed forth his own bottle of whisky to gain admittance to the circle. Their new friends greeted them happily and loudly, and it was clear the drinks had already started flowing. Tooru settled into the sand beside Shouyou and a curvaceous Amazonian-looking woman, and felt his shoulders relax as the warmth of the fire and the buzz of liquor-sweetened conversation washed over him.

Content to listen and absorb for now, he let his gaze wander idly across the faces around him, all lit by the flickering warmth of the flames. When he came to a pair of eyes that were coolly regarding him in return, he tilted his head and snapped back to attention. The eyes were dark, almost black in the low light, and set below thick dark brows into a face which was nut brown, but looked golden in the firelight. 

Tooru let his eyes slide slowly down the man’s body to where his fingers were stroking the condensation off the neck of his beer bottle, and let the man see his tongue dart out to swipe over his lips, wetting them slightly. Then he turned away, covering his smirk with a swig straight from the bottle of fireball he was nursing. 

The night had just got a little more interesting. 

For the next hour he settled in to play the game he had initiated, glancing occasionally at the man who always seemed either to already be looking at him or to feel the weight of his glance and catch his eye. 

He would let his gaze smoulder and his thumb swipe over his bottom lip after a long drag from his bottle, then turn his face away to talk to his Amazonian neighbour, or to check on Shouyou. When it seemed he was getting very giggly very quickly, Tooru took a moment to hide a few of his cruisers in the sand behind their backs. 

Each time, he felt the gaze of his playmate grow hotter and heavier, and his face grow darker and more predatory. It didn’t matter that his hair was too short on the sides and not spiky enough on top, or that his brows were too thick and his eyes oval-shaped rather than perfectly upturned almonds; Tooru craved the attention of pursuit, and this nameless man was going to give him that, if only for the night —more than willingly, if the eye-fucking was any indication.

When he saw that his paramore had finished his fourth beer and was leaning back on his hands, eyebrows furrowed slightly as he gazed at Tooru, Tooru decided it was time to stop playing. Brushing his hands off, he leaned towards Shouyou to murmur, “I’ll be back soon, be good,” into his ear. Then he got up quietly and, without turning back to see if he was being followed, started walking along the bank of sand dunes until he thought he had gone far enough to be swallowed up by the darkness at the edge of the bonfire. 

He stood for a long moment, gazing at the crescent moon which was smiling at him at just the wrong angle. Then he heard the crunch of sand beneath heavy feet and, before he could turn, felt two strong hands slide over his hips to hold him in place as a set of teeth nipped at the juncture of his neck and shoulder. 

“<I thought you weren’t coming,>” he teased, swaying back against the cradle of hips pressing against his ass. 

“<You make me wait,>” came the guttural response in a voice deep and thick as molasses, and —okay, sure, the voice was hot, but what a sin to have missed the pun Tooru had set him up for so beautifully. He could be forgiven, Tooru supposed, since English clearly wasn’t his first language, but he would have to work for it.

Tooru spun in his grip and crashed their lips together, slipping his tongue immediately into the other man’s mouth to taste the heady mix of spices and hops that sat on his tongue. His companion dropped his hands to palm roughly at Tooru’s ass and bit his lower lip hard, making Tooru inhale sharply in a gasp which was not entirely pleased. He grabbed the man’s wrists and flipped them around, pushing him backwards against the sand dune so he could take charge. 

He pulled off the linen shirt which he knew had sat so nicely on his collarbones and threw it aside, sinking down until he was straddling the man. His knees dug into the sand on either side of his hips until their clothed groins brushed together, and he hummed low in his throat. Although the shirt had certainly looked amazing on him, as well he knew, his companion seemed to prefer its absence because he took the opportunity to run his hands over Tooru’s chest and abs, falling to his bare hips and bringing their groins together again sharply. 

Tooru gasped and tipped his head back, trying to get out of his mind and just  _ feel _ , and when his partner began to lave his tongue in deliberate strokes up the expanse of Tooru’s long neck where the skin was so so sensitive, leaving little nips and bites behind it, he felt himself start to harden in his pants. Under the guidance of the hands still low on his waist, he began to roll his hips on his companion’s lap, feeling the answering hardness pressing up against him. 

When those same hands moved to yank open the buttons of his shorts, slightly on the too-rough side but nothing Tooru couldn’t handle, and slide the zipper of his fly down slowly so he could feel every inch of the metal teeth against his cock, he moaned low and closed his eyes. He didn’t need to see to know what to do next: a circle of his hips here, a sloppy kiss there, a hand down between them and another in the man’s hair to tug  _ just _ _so_ until he was putty in his hands, was so close to flipping Tooru over and claiming him with his hands or his mouth, at this point anything would be fine; so close to making him lose his mind in turn, making him forget everything—

“Ahem!” 

Tooru jerked upright, hands flying away from the man beneath him as if they’d been scalded. He had never heard anyone clear their throat so accusingly, and although the light was still low enough that it was impossible to make out fine details, he knew exactly who was standing above them. 

“I’m sorry for interrupting,” Shouyou said in a voice which didn’t sound sorry at all. “I came to see where you’d gone, Tooru, but I didn’t realise you had a friend with you. Do you need a moment?” 

Tooru scrambled to get hold of his shirt and slip it over his head in a cascade of sand, falling off his seat on the nameless man’s lap in his hurry to regain his decency. He didn’t know why he was suddenly flooded with shame at being found mid-tumble on a sand dune in the middle of the night when he had certainly done worse, but as he turned away to tuck his uncomfortably hard length back into his pants and rebutton his shorts, his cheeks burned. 

His erstwhile lover was still laying back in the sand, jeans undone and hands raised in the universal gesture of ‘ _ what the hell _ ?’ but Tooru ignored him and followed Shouyou several paces down the beach. He had become boring, and quite frankly had been lining up to be only a mediocre fuck at best.

“What’s wrong, Shouyou,” Tooru asked with forced calm as he surreptitiously pulled the hem of his shirt down to lend him all the cover he could possibly get. He knew his hair was a mess and his lips were red and kiss-bitten but he was hoping Shouyou couldn’t see either very clearly. 

“Can I have a word, Tooru? In a bit more private?” The ice in Shouyou’s voice was something he’d never heard before and it made Tooru’s hackles rise. Good, anger was good, he could use anger over shame. 

“What’s the problem,” he asked again, but this time he let a sliver of ice enter his own voice. 

Shouyou followed Tooru a little distance away from the dunes, further into the darkness of the beach so their party couldn’t hear the tone of their conversation, and out of the corner of his eye Tooru saw the man he’d just left slink back to the fireside, legs bowed and throwing dirty glances over his shoulder. They stood not quite facing the other fully, but with their eyes were locked defiantly in the weak light of the moon. 

“I saw that guy follow you into the dunes and I thought you might be in a bit of trouble or something,” Shouyou said at last.

“Well, I wasn’t, clearly. So I’ll ask again, what is your problem?” He enunciated each word clearly and separately, dropping his chin to stare Shouyou down with hooded eyes.

That was definitely a flinch he saw, but Tooru resolutely refused to feel bad when Shouyou was the one who had an issue with him.

“My problem is that you’re supposed to be crazy about Iwaizumi!” he exploded, throwing his arms out wide. “You spend so much time thinking about him —don’t deny it I see it on your face— and you’re driving us halfway across Europe to see him, but at the same time you still let some random pull you into the sand dunes to have his way with you. How can you let some stranger touch you when you’re gone on someone else?” His voice had turned brittle and a little desperate, and the disappointment Tooru could hear behind it, as if he owed something to the kid, only made him angrier. 

“Don’t make it sound so black-and-white like this is some damn fairy tale,” he scorned; “real life is much more complicated than that, and if you don’t think so then you’re naive.”

“How much simpler could it be? How can you want someone else’s hands on you who’s not Iwaizumi? Doesn’t it mean anything special to want him like you wanted that guy just now?”

“I fail to see what business that is of yours.” His lips were white with anger, but Shouyou refused to take a step back.

“It’s my business when I’m the one you’re taking along on this crazy escapade, and when I’m the one that has to watch you disappear inside your head anytime a sad song or, heck, even a happy song that’s a bit too strong on the love stuff comes on the radio! I’m just trying to understand, Tooru.” 

“I don’t owe you an explanation, Hinata!” Tooru snarled, losing the tight grip he had over his temper. “I don’t owe you anything, so if I want to fuck half the countryside or forget about my best friend for five minutes then that is my prerogative and you have no right to tell me otherwise. So what if I want to feel wanted for a while, who the hell are you to tell me no?”

“I’m your friend!” Shouyou shouted. It was not the response Tooru had been expecting and it made him pause long enough to give Shouyou time to push his advantage. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, Tooru, but you’re wrong about me having no right to worry about you. If it made you happy then I wouldn’t care if you f— if you banged everyone around that fire, but you didn’t even give that guy a second look when he walked away even though he was staring at you. Did you even like him?” 

Not really, was the honest answer, but the red haze of anger lingering around his peripherals wouldn’t allow Tooru to tell him he was right. 

“Or was it just that he looked enough like Iwaizumi?”

Tooru jerked back. His first instinct was to lash out at Shouyou, whether verbally or physically, even he couldn’t say which; but he dug his fingernails into his palms as hard as he could to quell the urge. In the frigid silence that followed, Shouyou seemed to realise he was in danger of being throttled, and he broke eye contact and ducked his head. 

“I’m sorry, Tooru, I don’t want to fight. I just actually really care what happens to you, and I don’t like it when my close friends are hurting.”

Are we close friends? he thought, momentarily derailed from his fury. He repeated the question aloud, and watched as Shouyou’s brow creased in confusion. 

“Yes? I mean, unless you routinely talk about your love life with strangers, but it did take a near-death experience to get you to admit it, so I kind of doubt it.” 

Tooru exhaled slowly and let his fists relax. His fingers tingled as the blood flooded back into them, and with it came the ache of the four crescent cuts he had made in each palm. 

For a man who had perhaps hundreds of people who would claim they were his friend in an instant, he could count on two hands with fingers left over the friends he considered truly close to him. Raul was like a fond older brother in that he let Tooru carry on with his nonsense while simultaneously staunchly refusing to let him do anything that would actually hurt him; Makki and Mattsun existed purely to take the piss out of him; Hajime knew him often better than he knew himself and had never been afraid to call him out on his bullshit; and even Tetsu and Shigeru, his most easy-going friends, had once or twice been his adversary in some truly blistering rows. 

And yet, for all this Tooru had never been worried they would betray his confidence or use what they knew about him to belittle him. So maybe, if Shouyou had managed to get close enough to be counted as one of the fingers without Tooru even realising, his discovery of the person under Tooru’s multitude of masks wouldn’t be such a bad thing. 

He exhaled again, letting it carry the tension from his shoulders. Weariness suddenly swept over him, as if the incandescent anger that had been burning a hole in his stomach was the only thing keeping him standing straight. 

“I just… I miss how it feels.” Shouyou frowned and opened his mouth, no doubt to tell him that hedonism was no excuse for what he saw as borderline infidelity. “I miss how it was to be wanted.” Tooru hated saying the words out loud, but at this point experience had taught him that Shouyou wouldn’t let go of a fight he saw as just until he had the answers he wanted.

“Well, I want you. Not like that!” he squeaked as Tooru raised an eyebrow. “But it’s not like there isn’t anybody who enjoys spending time with you with your clothes on, too. And... maybe a person who would want to do both, if you’d give him the chance.” 

Shouyou risked a glance up at Tooru through his lashes. “I promise I’ll shut up after this, but it feels like you already think you know what Iwaizumi is going to say so you’re acting out a heartbreak that hasn’t even happened yet. Please just give him the chance to tell you himself, then we can go to plan B if we need.”

Tooru exhaled hard and scrubbed at his face with both hands. “So now I’m being lectured by a literal child. Fuck, what a night.”

“Do you wanna go for a walk?” Shouyou asked after a pause. 

“God, yeah, honestly I can’t think of anything worse than going back to that fire now. I buried your cruisers in the sand so they should still be there in the morning.” 

They turned away from the glow of the bonfire in unison, bumping shoulders once before Tooru stuffed his hands in his pockets and lead them down the beach to dip their feet in the water.

“I thought you were going to hit me earlier,” Shouyou said after a while, hands on his hips as he stared up at the stars. 

“So did I,” Tooru murmured. 

“I probably would have deserved it, too.”

“Don’t say that. ”

They wandered around the headland and eventually came to a stop on the maiden sand of the beach one cove over. “Don’t think you deserve that. Otherwise I’ll need to teach you what treatment you should expect from nice boys and girls, and if you get me in uncle mode I won’t be responsible for the number of scarves these fingers knit you.” 

“Woah, you can knit?!”

“I was being facetious, Shouyou.” 

They settled into the sand, agreeing in a quick murmured conversation that neither wanted very much to go back to the car via the beach they had just left. They hadn’t spent more than one night in any one town, so if they sat here until sunrise and slept the day away instead, Tooru said, it wouldn’t impede their journey at all. 

So they stayed laying on the sand, not close enough to touch but with no more than an arm’s length between them, and talked nonsense and nothing-conversations to pass the time. 

When the sun began to rise over the city behind them, Tooru reached up from his nest in the sand to nudge Shouyou’s thigh. “We should get back to the car,” he murmured, “I don’t know about you but I’m ready for some hardcore napping. Also, if I end up having an awkward dream you’re not allowed to judge me because you’re the world’s worst cockblock.”

Shouyou only laughed as he let Tooru pull him to his feet and back along the beach towards the smouldering remains of the bonfire.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Noyaaaa :D   
> We’re getting to the pointy end, not long now until we get some Iwa so hold onto your hats folks!

Several afternoons later saw Tooru sitting on the roof of the station wagon where it was pulled over on the side of the road, just past the canal at the Viareggio city limits. He sat cross-legged, eyes closed and palms facing skywards where they rested on his knees, and let his breath deepen as the breeze played through his hair.

As his breath count hit twenty, the tranquility of the scene was disrupted by a loud crash beneath him. Tooru could only presume it was a collision between Shouyou’s thick skull and the ceiling of the car. Without opening his eyes, he called, “Have you checked underneath the passenger's seat? It may have slipped down.”

“I’ve checked everywhere, I don’t know where the stupid thing has got to! It can’t have fallen out, right?”

“I doubt it, unless you habitually open car windows in your sleep and throw whatever you’re holding out of them. This is just what you get when you fall asleep with your phone in your hand and refuse to lie still like a normal person. Check under the blankets again, your phone case is the same colour as them so maybe it’s just blending in.”

“I’ve already looked through them like a hundred times I swear, I know you seem to think I’m just a kid who would lose his own head if it wasn’t attached to his shoulders but in case you didn’t know, or in case you’ve forgotten, I’m actually an adult who— oh wait, here it is.”

Only then did Tooru open his eyes, bringing them to the heavens imploringly in a silent question to the Gods of what he could possibly have done to deserve Hinata Shouyou. 

“Okay we’re good now,” Shouyou said, re-emerging from the back of the car with a triumphant smile. “See I told you I’d find it you didn’t need to go stressing out like that, I knew it had to be here somewhere.”

They stood staring at each other for a moment, Shouyou with his hair in even more disarray than usual and Tooru still sitting serenely on the roof with his body turned towards the beatific golden hour before him. When it became clear that Shouyou was incapable of understanding the ironic twitch of Tooru’s eyebrows though, the latter rolled his eyes and suppressed a smile. “Sure, Sho. Don’t you have a phone call to make?”

“Oh, right! That’s a cool song, by the way, will you add it to my playlist on your phone?” He turned away to make his call as Tooru waved a hand in acquiescence. The song in question was a Wolf Alice standard, something like  _ Don’t Delete the Kisses _ if Tooru remembered correctly, and it was the perfect mix of secret nostalgia and contended hopefulness to watch a sunset to, particularly one so beautifully framed by the masts of quaint fishing vessels bobbing in the warm Ligurian Sea. 

Once again Tooru was a little surprised by how little had changed between the two of them, aside from the lack of antagonism that had mostly been fuelled by Tooru’s reticent nature. The conversations on the long drives were still superficial and nonsensical, and the silences between them still comfortable and unburdensome. 

They sang along now whenever happy songs came on Tooru’s playlists, and when the sad songs followed them, Shouyou would either skip them, hum along obnoxiously or make jokes during all but a handful to lighten the mood. With the few that he had learned not to touch, the ones that Tooru loved listening to even though they tore him open, Shouyou had started singing along softly, turning his face away to gaze out the window. 

Tooru wasn’t sure whether that was for his benefit or because Shouyou spent that time thinking about someone else, but when Tooru had asked him one time what (who) he was thinking about, Shouyou had only turned back to him with his thousand kilowatt smile and replied, “Oh, just our adventure up to this point. Like a ‘Previously on…’, except it’s our lives and it’s the important bits that got us to be sitting here just at this moment, you know?”

Now, sitting on the side of a road leading into Viareggio with the faint smell of the fishing wharves below him floating upwards on the breeze, Tooru supposed he did know. With a little under a week left to get up to Bern in time to meet up with the two teams, Tooru was beginning to feel a weight on his chest that had everything to do with his growing fear of the impending meeting. 

Objectively he knew that he couldn’t stay on the road forever. Every road trip had to have a destination, but as the destination drew nearer the memories of what had driven him and Hajime apart in the first place resurfaced more and more often like bad dreams he couldn’t shake. The image of Hajime’s face when he had told him he was going to go to Porto to play in the beach league, stunned and bloodless like Tooru had just slapped him, was etched into the underside of his eyelids. 

_ “I can’t go with you, Tooru, what are you thinking? What is there for me in Portugal?”  _ Ironically, the disbelief on his face had in turn been like a slap to Tooru, both of them standing on opposite sides of his bedroom gaping at one another.  _ “Me!” _ Tooru had wanted to yell, but by that stage he’d already felt his walls slamming down to protect what was left of his heart, and instead he’d raised his brow like the whole thing wasn’t tearing him apart.

_ “I guess you won’t be waiting for me when I get back, then.” Please wait for me, _ he’d meant, but Hajime, who was meant to know him better than he knew himself, had either not read the true meaning in his eyes or hadn’t cared _.  _

_ “I guess not.”  _

What else had there been to say? 

So here Tooru was, six months later, desperate to see Hajime but terrified of what would happen when he did. If only he could just stay on the road a little longer: maybe he could amass the courage he’d need to lay his heart bare to the one person in the world best equipped to tear it to shreds again. If he could just meet a few more amazing people and hear a handful more stories from other itinerant travelers on their journey, maybe they would lend him their fearlessness when, for the first time, his seemed to be failing him. 

“So I just got off the phone with Noya,” Shouyou chirped, appearing so suddenly at Tooru’s elbow that he jerked violently and had to clap a hand to his chest to stave off a heart attack. 

“And he is super pumped that we’re here, he says he has some errands to run because he’s going out on a fishing boat tomorrow and he has to get some stuff sorted first, but he’d love to meet us in this little bar later, he gave me the name but I’ve already forgotten it, but he said it was on the main street and there were some numbers in the name so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Wanna book into the hotel and have a shower then head over when it gets dark? What’s wrong with you, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, why are you glaring at me?”

Several hours later, after a stupendously hot shower and a full hair- and skincare regime in apology to his neglected routine, Tooru found himself walking down what was probably the longest street in the world next to what was probably the biggest idiot.

“What about that one, that has numbers in the name.”

“Mmm no I don’t think that was it, it doesn't ring any bells.” 

A muscle twitched in Tooru eyebrow. He was swiftly running out of patience, and Shouyou refused to re-call Nishinoya because he said the ex-libero had told him he wouldn’t have his phone on him after he left his apartment. “What about that one? Caffé 22, that has to be it right?” 

“I don’t think so. Actually, maybe that was it. Hang on, let’s have a look in the window—”

Tooru was spared the indignity of peering through a dark window into a darker bar by the sound of Shouyou’s name being called out in a high, excited voice.

“Hey, Shouyou! Is that really you?” Shouyou’s face lit up and he whipped around to face the speaker, Tooru following suit a little slower. In front of them, dressed in sandals, cargo pants and a well-worn mizuno t-shirt, stood Yuu Nishinoya of Karasuno High.

Tooru would recognise that manic grin anywhere from the years he had spent staring at it through a net, and as he took a moment to sweep his eyes over the newcomer he noted that not much had changed about him other than that he had grown into his body, his broad shoulders now those of a man rather than a skinny, recalcitrant teenager. 

His hair still stuck up all over his head like he had been electrocuted, though it was a little shorter now, and he had kept the shock of blond at his forehead. As he jumped excitedly onto Shouyou, arms wrapping around his orange head despite still being shorter than his kouhai, it seemed his indefatigable energy had not dulled with time either.

After the frenzy of reacquainting themselves had receded, Nishinoya turned those wild eyes of his on Tooru with a look that was, although not unfriendly, certainly curious. He cocked his head and smiled a more subdued smile. “Hey man. Shouyou told me he was travelling with you but I didn’t really believe it until just now. How’s it going?” 

Tooru shook the proffered hand, grip firm and sure as he smiled back. “I’m surprised Shouyou even mentioned I was coming.” He didn’t miss the quirk of an eyebrow at his use of Shouyou’s given name. “I was half sure he’d forget to tell you at all.” The subject of this exchange squawked indignantly but Nishinoya only laughed loudly, unable to deny his ex-teammate’s more scatterbrained qualities. 

“Anyway, you can tell me all about your trip so far once we get inside. Come on, this place doesn’t have the nicest decor in the world but the drinks are cheap and the views are to die for.”

It wasn’t an overstatement to say that the decor wasn’t the nicest, the two small windows casting minimal light over an interior decorated in the style of a tiki bar as imagined by someone who had never been inside one. It was gaudy and clichéd and more than a little grimy if you looked too closely at the faux wooden countertops, but once they had ordered their drinks and were seated outside on the deck area, Tooru understood what Nishinoya had meant about the view. 

The bar sat in the exact centre of the bay, facing the ocean in the gap between a copse of tall palm trees and a cluster of bathing huts. The sand shone gold under the fading rays of the setting sun and the entirety of the beach was lined with rows of striped beach umbrellas and bathing chairs. Most families had already left, but there were a few stragglers left packing up their towels and clothes, trying to wrangle their children and collect their toys. It felt like summer personified, hazy, golden and lazy, hot sun and cold beer and a child laughing as its father blew a raspberry on its stomach. 

Tooru took a long pull from his beer as Shouyou babbled happily at Nishinoya, but as the former paused to nibble on the skewered pineapple in his tall glass and the latter settled further into his chair and turned his head, Tooru tuned back in expectantly. 

“So,” Nishinoya began, gazing between them as he took a drag from his own beer and licked the stray drops from his bottom lip, “what are you guys doing in Italy?” 

“Well, we’re just here on a detour to see you, we’re actually going up Switzerland to see Daichi and Kageyama’s teams play.” 

“My best friend plays in Sawamura’s team,” Tooru added by way of explanation when Nishinoya’s eyes flicked towards him questioningly. 

“Ah, right, I think I remember him mentioning something like that. How long have you guys been on the road?” 

What he really wanted to ask, Tooru knew, was  _ how did you two start travelling together _ , so when Shouyou simply answered “Almost two weeks I think?” and glanced up at him, he nodded and said “We met in Porto after I won the beach volleyball championship there,” and let Shouyou continue the story. 

What he was not expecting was for Shouyou to conclude the story by saying, “So basically he kidnapped me, but it was kinda lucky because I was on the lookout for something fun to do, so I didn’t mind too much.” Tooru inhaled his mouthful of beer and began to choke at the same moment he felt Nishinoya’s fierce gaze snap to his face. 

“Jesus, Shouyou, we talked about that after you almost had Sawamura set the dogs on me. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t get me arrested, please and thank you.” 

Nishinoya was still looking at him even as Shouyou commenced the retelling of the horrors they had encountered their first night in a Salamancan hostel, but Tooru didn’t lower his eyes. He was sure that Nishinoya was no more naturally mistrustful than Tooru was naturally cautious, but Nishinoya didn’t know Tooru— or knew him by his high school reputation, which was definitely worse —and no doubt had an idea of him which was far from complimentary. 

After a long moment, Nishinoya turned back to Shouyou and Tooru watched as they resumed their comparison of all the MacDonald’s they had been through in all the different countries they had visited, of all things, feeding energy back and forth between them. They were noisy and lively, and Tooru was content to sit back and watch them while he finished his first beer. 

It seemed Nishinoya had left Japan as soon as he’d made enough money doing odd jobs around Miyagi, and had headed straight to South America to backpack his way across it. 

“...And then he says that I have to pay for his alpaca even though the damn thing had followed me all the way to Machu Picchu from Santa Teresa on its own, eating all my snacks while my back was turned too.” Shouyou was enraptured, enthralled by the story and by Nishinoya’s good-humoured and vivacious storytelling, and even Tooru could admit that he was way too invested in this story to leave now in search of a refill. 

“What did you do?” Shouyou practically had stars in his eyes at this point, and Nishinoya sent him a grin like he knew he had him eating out the palm of his hand.

“Well the only thing that would get him off my back was my MP3 player that I’d brought along because the battery lasted so much longer than my iPod. So I gave him that, and he gave me his alpaca. Me and Nancy got pretty close on the walk to Aguascalientes, but when I got there I realised I must have left my cash in the hotel in Santa Teresa because I had nothing. So I had to trade her for a night in some barn, though the farmer did let me use her as a blanket that night because otherwise I would have frozen my balls off.” 

Shouyou burst into a peel of laughter and wrapped his arms around himself as he tipped his head back. Nishinoya laughed too, more at Shouyou’s reaction to his story, but when he heard Tooru’s quiet chuckles he glanced at him like he had forgotten he was there. He turned his shoulders more towards Shouyou, crossing one ankle over his knee and leaning an elbow on the vinyl tabletop. 

Tooru didn’t know whether it had been the intended consequence, but the action effectively cut him out of the conversation and created a buffer between him and Shouyou. 

For a moment he was incensed, chin tipping down dangerously as he surveyed Nishinoya through his lashes, but then he saw Shouyou laugh at something his old senpai had said and reach forward to wrap his hands around the older man’s forearms excitedly. Let them be happy, he thought; tonight wasn’t about him. It was clear from how he positioned his body and spoke to Shouyou that Nishinoya was protective of him; that Shouyou didn’t need protecting and was very much more than capable of fending for himself was not within Tooru’s rights to tell him. 

He excused himself to go buy another round of drinks, giving him an excuse to check his phone and maybe message Mattsun and Makki, but before he could make it to the bar he collided with a mass which spilled half of its drink onto his jeans. 

He turned to the person who had walked into him, sneer ready and cutting remark on the tip of his tongue, but both died when a pair of lovely wide eyes met his. 

The girl was gorgeous, very Italian, with dark features and full red lips currently opened on a silent and horrified o of surprise. She said several choppy sentences in rapid Italian, none of which Tooru understood, but he could gather enough from how she raised her hands to cover her beautiful mouth that they were words of contrition. 

“<It’s okay,>” he broke in in English, hoping she knew enough to understand him. “<Not a big deal.>”

“<You are English?>” Her accent was charmingly strong and her voice mellow. There was a mole tucked into the dimple on her right cheek which had no doubt been the subject of many kisses. 

“<Japanese.>” 

She looked him up and down, almost too brazenly, and the way she twirled her curls through her fingers was over-exaggerated. When she staggered slightly on her high platform heels as she pulled her bag more securely onto her shoulder, Tooru realised she was more than a little tipsy. 

“<Well I am Laura. Maybe I can buy us a drink? Since I no longer have one.>” She held up her glass which was now mostly ice and no liquid. 

Tooru huffed a laugh and gazed down into her pretty face, eyes darting between her dark eyes and her kissable lips. 

“<No, thank you,>” he said after a long pause; “<you don’t need to do that. But if you’d allow me I’d like to get you some cool water then walk you back to your friends?>”

Her smile fell slightly and she tucked her hair self-consciously behind her ears, curling an arm around herself. But when Tooru smiled down at her and offered her first the glass of icy water he had ordered from the bar, then his arm, she took both shyly and allowed him to lead her back to where her friends were ostentatiously not watching the pair walk (wobble) back to their table. 

He left her with a showy kiss on the back of her knuckles and a wink to soothe any sting of rejection, and, making a quick detour back to the bar to finally buy himself another beer, returned to his own table. 

It was clear when he sat back down that both Shouyou and Nishinoya had been watching him through the doorway. Shouyou was grinning at him, an obnoxiously knowing glint in his eyes, and Nishinoya was regarding him anew with interest. 

“She not your type?” The question was light and teasing, but Tooru could tell Nishinoya was genuinely curious. 

He shrugged as he pushed the wedge of lemon stuck in the neck of his beer bottle further down until it fell into the liquid with a small plop. “Drunk girls shouldn’t really be anyone’s type, should they? Besides, Shouyou says I’m not allowed to flirt anymore.”

Shouyou snorted into his drink in indignation and flicked a glacé cherry stem at him childishly. “That’s not what I meant and you know it! Your flirting is the least of my worries.” Nishinoya glanced between them in slight confusion, but when Shouyou continued on with his story —which unfortunately seemed to be the time he found Tooru on the floor after he’d nearly brained himself trying to get out of a slippery shower, and brought the shower curtain with him on his way down —the ex-libero seemed content to let it go. 

His body was facing forward now, and though he still had an elbow resting on the tabletop so he could turn and watch Shouyou as he talked, his chest was open to Tooru and he glanced at him to share a mutual eye roll as Shouyou’s story devolved into sound effects. 

They traded many more stories, all three of them seemingly on a quest to find the most embarrassing tale of the others, and the more Tooru talked the more Nishinoya seemed to take to him. While he was glad for the apparent breakthrough, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it correcting Nishinoya’s apparent assumption that he was nothing more than a degenerate fuckboy.

After another long while and many more beers than was perhaps wise, Tooru allowed himself to slip back into his own mind, the conversation washing over him. Nishinoya and Shouyou were both vibrant, vivacious companions, easily entertained and highly entertaining, but put together Tooru got the feeling they had a tendency to become exhausting. He cupped his face in his palm and lounged sideways across the table, idly spinning one of the empty beer bottles across the table.

That girl, Laura...her drunkenness hadn’t been the only factor in his rejection, although it had certainly been one of the more compelling. She had been beautiful, that much was clear to anyone, let alone a man such as himself who loved all things naturally beautiful. When he had looked into her face, though, at her lips and into her eyes, all he had felt was a passing fancy for her beautiful dark eyes. 

It was hard to admit the reason why he felt so little for her. Tooru had never believed in living his life waiting for others, but now that it was finally allowed to think about Hajime again his body had shown him what it wanted and didn’t seem inclined to listen to his broader philosophical outlook on life. The dream he had had the night before had been a pretty damning piece of evidence to this effect.

That dream, the likes of which he hadn’t had for so many months he couldn't even remember the last, had put Hajime smack bang back in the centre of his thoughts—  _ all _ his thoughts, not just his idle daydreaming. He had woken up panting and hard, neck arched back and sweat curling the short hairs by his face as phantom hands on his body drove him to squeeze his eyes shut and open his mouth on a soundless moan. 

The Hajime in his dreams had held him down as his mouth descended on his cock, tight and so unbelievably hot, so Tooru’s hands had followed the path laid out by his imagination. He had taken his own cock in hand and pumped it with long, tight strokes, biting the knuckles of his other hand to keep from crying out when he thumbed the sensitive slit, his traitorous mind conjuring up a visual of Hajime’s tongue dipping in instead. 

He had kept up that same desperate pace until he’d felt his orgasm begin to rip through him, at which point all of the iron will in the world couldn't have stopped him imagining Hajime on his knees with his hand between his own legs, face tilted upwards, eyes glazed with want and mouth slack in anticipation of what Tooru was about to give him. 

He had come so hard he’d felt as though he’d been punched in the solar plexus, unable to suck in enough oxygen as his skin caught fire and his muscles flexed almost painfully, toes curling hard against the sheets. The only thing that had given him the presence of mind to slap his hand over his mouth was the distant thought that Shouyou was lying in a bed at the other side of the room, blissfully asleep and definitely wanting to stay that way. 

Shouyou’s voice calling his name in a lilting sing-song drew his attention back to the pair sitting across from him. Both of them had matching flushed cheeks and glittering eyes, and Tooru swallowed a smirk as he watched Shouyou wave a finger exaggeratedly under his nose. 

“What are you thinking about Tooru, what’s got your face all—” He scrunched up his nose and bit his lip in a poor parody of the expression no doubt plastered all over Tooru’s face before he had let it fall back into his habitual smirk. 

“I was just thinking about that time you screamed like a girl when we were swimming across the Villefranche-sur-Mer harbour to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and something brushed against your foot.” 

As he had thought, Shouyou’s self-preservation instinct was stronger than his desire to get under Tooru’s skin, and he began to splutter vehement denials.

“I didn’t scream like a girl, I screamed like a man who thought he was about to be eaten by the shark from ‘Jaws’! Anyway, you know you’re not allowed to tease me for that seeing as how you hate the underside of boats.”

“Hey, speaking of boats and islands,” Nishinoya broke in, “if you guys wanted I could have a word with the captain of the boat I’m working on tomorrow. We’re just going to Corsica to drop off a load of vegetables the locals can’t grow on the island, then picking up some of their dairy products they make there to sell back in Italy, so it won’t take more than three or four days tops. It’s not hard work and it’s not crazy well-paid but Corsica is beautiful and if you’re looking for a different type of adventure then it might be a break from staring at a road for a while.” He shrugged and turned a smile on both of them, free and easy. 

Corsica was… definitely not where Tooru had been expecting tonight to take him. It felt a little like going backwards, considering it was technically French territory and they had left France days ago, but the idea of something new, of using his muscles for an honest day’s work in the sun, was certainly tempting. 

When he turned to face Shouyou and saw the other boy already looking at him with those stars again shining in his eyes, he let the temptation take hold of him.

“Why not? If it’s okay with the captain then count us in.”

Shouyou whooped and high-fived Nishinoya. “This is going to be so much fun, it’s going to be like old times except obviously we never lived on a boat and I don’t speak any French or Italian but— oh, wait.” His grin faltered and he glanced back up at Tooru. “Do we have time to go to Corsica and still be in Bern in time to see Iwaizumi and the others?” 

Oh yeah, that old nugget. “Yeah, we probably will.” 

“Probably? Don’t we have to be a bit more sure than probably?” 

Again, Nishinoya cast his eyes between the two of them, hands held up placatingly as if to absolve them of any responsibility. 

“If you guys don’t have the time then that’s all good, I don’t want you to miss out on seeing Daichi and the others, you know.”

“If you want to go to Corsica, Shouyou, then we’ll be able to find the time,” Tooru argued. “If Tobio and the others are there for the full tournament then at latest we’d arrive in the middle and just miss the first few rounds.”

“And if they aren’t?” Shouyou tilted his head and widened his eyes as if to imply that Tooru was an idiot. “Then we wouldn’t get to see them and, more importantly we wouldn’t get to _talk_ _to them_. I just don’t think we should risk it.”

Tooru looked away from his intense eye contact and waved his hand languidly as if to say that it was up to Shouyou. 

“I’m really sorry Noya, I wish we could come but we have some things to do up in Switzerland.” The contrition was clear in his voice, but Tooru knew without having to ask that if he suggested Shouyou go to Corsica if he wanted while Tooru continued on to Bern he would be shot down, so he kept his mouth shut and lowered his head. 

“No way, man, that’s so fine! I was really happy to see you guys tonight, I don’t want to mess up any plans. You do your thing, I was actually thinking of coming through Portugal in a month or so, so if you’re still around then we can catch up then.” 

After Shouyou had extracted a concrete promise from Nishinoya that he would indeed be coming to Portugal, otherwise Shouyou said he would make the journey to wherever he was to see him, things began to wind down. It was only just approaching 10, but they all knew that Nishinoya had an early start the following morning, and the other two a long drive northwards. 

When at last they said their final goodbyes, Shouyou clung to his ex-senpai a little longer than strictly necessary and turned away with a suspicious-sounding sniffle when he made himself let go. Nishinoya stood silhouetted under a streetlamp, watching them walk away, and Tooru had to put a hand on Shouyou’s shoulder to gently but firmly propel him forwards after the third time he had turned back around to wave.

“You okay?” Tooru asked an hour later when they had finally settled into their respective beds and turned out the lights. 

“Yeah.” Shouyou’s voice seemed a little small, but he made a valiant effort to lift it after another small sniffle. “Yeah, seeing Noya just made me feel really normal, then when we had to say goodbye I realised I probably wouldn’t feel that way again for a while.” 

Tooru knew exactly what he meant, but also knew that nothing he could say would make him feel much better, since he himself was one of the many foreign things that Shouyou had had to adjust to. So instead he just murmured a soft goodnight and rolled onto his side, giving Shouyou his privacy by pretending not to hear the almost-silent tears begin to fall.


	6. Chapter 6

The following morning dawned warm, bright and clear, but neither Tooru nor Shouyou was awake to see very much of it. By the time they had gotten up, gotten dressed, eaten a breakfast soaked in oil and caffeinated sufficiently, the sun was already high in the sky. 

When, after several hours of slow driving northwards away from the golden Viareggian beaches, Shouyou had yet to say more than a few short sentences to him, Tooru attributed it to late-night queasiness and weariness. His eyes were quite puffy, after all, and Tooru wasn’t sure how much sleep he’d managed to catch. 

They made an early stop in a town at the top end of the Italian coast whose name Tooru would never remember, and when Shouyou pleaded tiredness as an excuse to head to bed well before 9, Tooru let him go with only a slight feeling of concern.

When Shouyou again refused to be drawn out of his shell the day after, and even snapped at Tooru for ruffling his hair teasingly, Tooru began to worry in earnest. He had apologised straight away, but to Tooru, who had never seen him fired up about anything other than volleyball and, apparently, Tooru’s own bad life choices, the flare of temper had been a shock. 

They had left the coast behind altogether earlier that day and began the long trek up through miles of ubiquitous green farmland towards the Swiss border, but even the promise of a game of volleyball over an obliging hedgerow couldn’t bring back his trademark thousand kilowatt smile. As they lay back-to-back in the boot of the VW that night, each watching the stars move across the sky with glacial slowness from their respective windows, Tooru shifted so he could look over his shoulder.

The shadow cast by the window arch obscured Shouyou’s eyes, but the light thrown into the cab by the full moon illuminated his downturned lips and crinkled chin. “Are you okay, Shouyou? This isn’t like you, what’s got you so in your head?” 

Tooru had never felt comfortable being one of those people who could force a confession out of someone, but he wished that Shouyou would just tell him what was wrong so he could do something to fix it. When the kid only hummed questioningly and answered, “Nothing’s wrong, what do you mean?” like always, the sting of disappointment was unexpected.

When, on the third morning, he only picked at his breakfast bar, eating the chocolate and leaving the rest, Tooru threw down the blanket he had been folding and turned to confront him.

“Sho. What’s wrong. And if you say ‘nothing, Tooru’ with those bambi eyes of yours like I’m an idiot who doesn’t know you well enough by now, I’ll lock you out and make you walk the rest of the way.”

Shouyou paused with his mouth open, before snapping it shut with a petulant sniff. He opened his mouth once more, frowned, then closed it again slowly, turning his eyes to stare in consternation at the dessicated protein bar between his fingers.

Tooru waited, hands on hips, watching in silence as emotion after emotion flitted over Shouyou’s face. Only when he finally seemed to settled on morose confusion did Tooru sigh and move to sit beside him, eyebrow raised expectantly as he let his clasped hands fall between his knees. 

“I don’t know, okay?” Shouyou’s outburst was loud in the quiet clearing they had found at the edge of a farm, but it was frustration rather than anger that lent a bite to his words. “I don’t know why, I just wake up feeling crappy, but not like crappy in my stomach, just crappy all over. I get angry over silly things and I hate it when people talk around me and I can’t understand them, even though I’m the one who everyone else can’t understand. I’m sad even though everything says I should be happy, I feel like it’s taking so much of my energy just doing normal things, and all I want is a yoghurt that tastes like real yoghurt.”

By the end, Shouyou’s face was stricken and he looked like he was on the verge of tears. Tooru’s heart squeezed painfully in his chest to see such a pitiful sight before him, and he mentally berated himself for not realising earlier what was going on. Of course he was feeling this way; had been ever since they had seen Nishinoya, which should have been his first tip-off.

“Shouyou...” He swayed closer until their shoulders brushed, hoping the closeness would help the kid draw strength from him. “You’re homesick.”

Shouyou jerked in surprise and looked up at him with pinched, confused eyes. “What? No I’m not homesick, I called my parents before we saw Noya and I haven’t thought about them much since, so I can’t be homesick.”

“You don’t need to be homesick for your parents. Sometimes you just get homesick for one person, or for your whole life back home, or for your favourite yoghurt, apparently.” He paused to consider. “It makes you angry when you hear people talking in a different language because it reminds you you’re not at home, right? And you’re finding that all the differences that you thought were awesome stories to tell in the beginning are becoming frustrating and burdensome now? I’m sorry, Sho, but you’re homesick.” 

He laid a hand gingerly on Shouyou’s nape, ruffling the soft downy hairs that grew there. “Don’t beat yourself up, kid, it kinda comes hand in hand with the adventure shtick. Seeing and doing new things every day puts mileage on your soul.”

At that, Shouyou looked away, his eyes shimmering a little too brightly in the morning sun. “Did you get homesick at the beginning?”

“Of course. I still do occasionally, a little.”

“How did you get over it?” 

“Mostly it just takes time. Although I did have help from a little alcohol, a lot of volleyball and some pretty good friends.” He stood up and brushed his pants off. “But, since I’d rather not let you overindulge in the first, and the second is out of my hands, the best thing I can do for now is help you distract yourself until you forget that you’re halfway around the world and remember that you’re not alone. I think I saw some cute carnies setting up a circus in town, want to go check it out?”

Three days. The Japanese V-League teams would be in Bern in three days, whether or not Tooru and Shouyou were there to meet them, and from the news articles Tooru had read that morning it was looking increasingly likely that they wouldn’t linger more than a full day before moving on again.

“Sure,” Shouyou grinned, a little of his old sparkle returning to his eyes.

Three days to go, and Tooru spent the rest of that day trying to win hideous stuffed bears for Shouyou. 

They had managed at least to get a few towns higher that afternoon, but when the day count dropped to two after a fitful night of tossing and turning and guts ache from too much cotton candy, Tooru found himself stomping heavier than normal on the accelerator through the northern Italian rurality. For all Shouyou’s perceptiveness it seemed that he remained largely entwined in his own problems, because he hadn’t sensed the anxiety frissoning over Tooru’s bunched shoulders.

They spoke less than normal, both still caught up in their own heads, but that afternoon Shouyou began whistling along to his favourite pop anthems again, his irrepressibly happy spirit never long dampened.

Tooru, on the other hand, was a mess. 

With the day of reckoning so close on the horizon he couldn’t stop it from consuming his thoughts. It seemed like time was slipping through his fingers now, the hours ticking by inexcusably, inescapably fast like the last few grains of sand in an hourglass. The efforts he made to slow them down, to keep track of them so he wasn’t surprised by the pace of time racing past, only made him more aware of their intractability. 

He spent all day and all night thinking about Hajime, how Hajime would react to him, what Hajime would say, what he might yell, how he’d taste if Tooru ever got to kiss him again, repeat ad nauseum. The worst part of it all was that, the more Tooru retreated into his own head without the buffer of Shouyou’s aggressive friendship to coax him out, the more unprepared he felt to confront the man who’d held his dreams hostage the last week. 

At the same time, though, he was terrified of missing the game day for the same reason he’d been loathe to turn the car back around to Lisbon once he’d made the decision to take the turn away from it. 

They could still make it in good time, he told himself as he did some quick mental maths, they just needed to start the climb up the mountains towards the Swiss border by that evening at the latest. The sun was still a long way from setting, so it would be easy as pie. Time wouldn’t slip that far away from him; he could still catch it, still hold it, still get a little be closer.

Just as they began the climb up the foothill, though, he felt rather than saw Shouyou begin to fidget. 

“Hey,” Shouyou began as they slowed down to pass through a mountain town, “I know you don’t want to give me bad habits or anything, but I was thinking and I kinda really want to try some of those other coping mechanisms of yours.”

Tooru had a bad feeling he knew which Shouyou was referring to, but he asked anyway. 

“I really just want to have a few drinks with you and not think for a while and get out of the car to walk around a bit, I feel like I’m going crazy stuck in my head like this, I feel like I’m turning into you.”

Yeah, well, screw you too, Tooru thought with no real heat. “Just to be clear,” he said instead, “you want to get out of your head by getting drunk with me this afternoon?” Shouyou nodded eagerly, his eyes large and beseeching, and in the face of such earnestness Tooru could only sigh and pull the car over into a small car park by an archaic visitors’ centre. 

Two days left and Tooru was buying alcohol to day drink his problems away with a technical minor. 

Much later that afternoon, sitting a little ways off the main road on a slope overlooking an old disused logging railroad-cum-museum, Tooru discovered that when Shouyou said ‘forget our problems’ he meant ‘forget mine by dwelling on yours’. The level in the whisky bottle they had bought in the overpriced service station had begun to reflect their diligent attention to it, but as the conversation turned once again to the elephant dominating Tooru’s mind-room (what a poor metaphor, he ought to have the grace to be ashamed), he gave one final effort to turn it back the other way.

“Did you ever decide whether you actually missed your person Shouyou? Or have you managed to avoid thinking about them altogether?” 

A finger was waved dangerously close under his nose. “Shhhhh, we’re not talking about me tonight, Tooru, remember?”

Tooru definitely didn’t remember agreeing to that. 

“Tell me about Iwaizumi.” 

“No.”

“Oh come on,” Shouyou wheedled. “Tell me what you liked about him, he always looked so… so grumpy, there must have been something about him that made you burn up inside.”

Tooru was tempted to tell him to shove his wheedling somewhere inappropriate, but the inhibitions of yester-week seemed distant and nebulous now. That and Shouyou seemed calmer now than he had been in days, so Tooru relented.

Sighing, he let his head fall back against the car door with a thunk. “Kissing him was like…” What was it like? Rainfall in a drought? The first touch of spring in lifeless winter foliage? “Sex.”

“What?” Shouyou squeaked in surprise, cheeks colouring. “What does that even mean?” 

“It means… okay that was another bad metaphor. But it was like honey and hot summer days and…” he gestured indistinctly in front of him, “wanting something so much you catch fire, and then he’d give me that clever tongue of his and it was that perfect balance of push and pull that you get during good sex or really good dancing.” 

Shouyou’s whole face had slowly infused with a crimson glow, but he huffed a quiet laugh at that and lifted the bottle to his lips again. 

“He made nothing kisses kinda mean something more.”

“What was it like with him?” Shouyou asked finally after a laden pause, as if he’d been taking the time to work up the courage. 

“What, kissing? I already told you—”

“No, sex.” Shouyou was staring shyly but resolutely down the neck of the whisky bottle. “What was it like with someone you care about like that?” 

Now it was Tooru’s turn to colour faintly. “We never- I mean, by the time I left we hadn’t done much more than kiss, and some.” No, by the time they’d figured out that’s what they wanted Tooru had decided to go to Portugal and the distance was already growing between them.

“Oh! I’m sorry I didn’t mean to pry I—” 

“Nah it’s fine,” Tooru cut him, preempting his babbling. “We... just never got around to it when things were still good between us, and I kinda wanted to wait and save it for something special, which in hindsight was a bit laughable considering by that point in my life there really wasn’t much to save.” He snorted, but his companion stayed quiet. 

“Well I’ve never…” Shouyou began, “not at all, so…” 

“Okay.” Tooru reached across him to rescue the bottle of whisky from where Shouyou’s fingers had begun picking off the label and throwing the scraps of paper onto the bitumen. 

“That’s probably really weird for you, I mean I am 19 and everything but I’ve just never really found someone who thought about it with me the same way I’d think about it with them, and I didn’t want to just do it with anyone, I just—”

“Sho,” Tooru interrupted him for the second time. “The only thing that’s weird is having sex you don’t want, stop stressing about what I think. Besides,” he continued, bumping shoulders with the suddenly bashful redhead, “no doubt there’s a severely vitamin C deficient young individual somewhere just dying for a piece of your tangerine ass.” That drew a rise out of Shouyou who giggled drunkenly. 

“Hey Tooru,” he hedged as the man in question took a last long draw from the bottle. “Did you love him? _Do_ you love him?” 

Tooru tightened his hand on his own ankle and took his time swallowing, letting the fiery liquid burn his tongue on the way down as if to scorch away the unsaid words. 

“What do you think, Sho,” he said at last. 

Then he stood up only a little unsteadily and reached down to pull Shouyou up behind him. 

“Come on, let’s find a place to eat.” He deposited the mostly-empty bottle on the driver’s seat and locked the door behind it, before leading the way towards the faux-rustic pizzeria they had passed on the drive in. 

On the way they passed several people hurrying home from work and a few couples out for an evening stroll with prams. Tooru was losing track of the days but this was a reminder that elsewhere this was just a regular weekday, and that most people didn’t get drunk off a whole bottle of whisky and have deep conversations in the late afternoon sun sitting in a roadside car park. 

“We’ll get there, Tooru, don’t stress.” Shouyou spoke around a mouthful of pizza in response, Tooru supposed, to a look on his own face that he didn’t want to imagine. “We’ll get there in time, that’s how these things work, haven’t you ever seen any movies about true love?”

Tooru snorted and rolled his eyes, but when he was free to turn his face away he felt it fall back into a tight grimace of worry. He wasn’t nearly as sure, but to apply to the heavens for luck felt too much like an admission of defeat.

Morning dawned on the last full day before Hajime landed in Switzerland and Tooru couldn’t even find the energy to drag himself out from under the blankets he’d festooned himself with the night before. They had gotten to bed late, courtesy of too much bad pizza and the rest of the whisky, but even when they had lain down and Shouyou had immediately rolled over and begun to snore, Tooru couldn’t seem to make his mind stop turning. 

As a consequence his eyes, when he had blinked them open, were gritty and dry, and his head pounded with the dual assault of too much alcohol and not enough sleep. Shouyou didn’t even stir when he finally flung the blankets back and levered himself out from under an errant arm, and with the least amount of enthusiasm known to man he began to get himself ready for his morning run. 

The mountain mist swirled around him as his feet pounded against the even ground. If they hurried, they could probably make it down the other side of the mountains by that night, leaving just the drive across Switzerland for the following day. He’d heard stories about these mountains, though, and he knew how foolish it was to underestimate the time it would take to cross them. So, unless they drove for a solid chunk of each day they could kiss goodbye to the idea of arriving in time to watch the Japanese teams play.

As the sun began to burn away the morning mist which hung over the pine trees like a shroud, Tooru secretly wished that it would end up like a movie. He would be the main character and Hajime would be his lover, star-crossed and ardent, who spent his days sitting by the window and gazing out as he tried to imagine what Tooru was doing. Tooru pictured himself running into Hajime’s arms and couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the image evoked. 

By the time he returned to the car, feeling much more himself after having sweated out most of the whisky from the night before, Shouyou had woken up and was in the middle of getting dressed.

“So we’re climbing the mountains today right?” he asked once they were both freshly showered in the freezing water of the visitor centre, flopping backwards into the passenger seat and reaching forward to snag Tooru’s phone from its perpetual place on the dashboard.

“Well you may be feeling energetic enough to climb, but I plan to drive them,” Tooru answered glibly, grabbing his phone back and putting it vindictively between his legs. Shouyou rolled his eyes.

“So we should be there by tomorrow right? It doesn’t look so far on the map.” 

“Hopefully.” 

Tooru had queued one of the few playlists he and Shouyou agreed on, so as the bass of the first song kicked in they subsided into amicable silence. 

“This song is so cool, like it’s only got one line in it but I still love it so much,” Shouyou commented half an hour later as they began to climb more steeply. “How are musicians so talented?” 

“It’s a remix, the original is from the 60s I think.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah, it was written by Frankie Valli, it’s called _Can’t Take My Eyes Off You_. It’s pretty cute, it’s about falling in love with someone more every time you see them.”

“Huh.” Shouyou tilted his head to the side, but when he didn’t elaborate they slipped back into their habitual silence.

Several hours later, as the car began to slow under the demands of the steep climb and sharp corners, Shouyou’s brow crinkled.

“What do you mean, hopefully?”

“Huh?”

“You said we’d _hopefully_ be there by tomorrow. Not by tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow evening, you just said _tomorrow._ Aren’t you sure?”

“If we can keep up this pace then yes, I am.” It wasn’t a lie but it may have been a slight omission —the doubt lay in their very ability to keep up the pace. It seemed to mollify Shouyou, though, and he settled back further into his coat.

An hour more, though, and he was getting restless. They had had to stop several times along the increasingly freezing mountain road to layer on their jackets, as the VW’s heating had reached capacity about an hour outside of Saint-Vincent. Now, wrapped in all of the layers he had thought prudent to bring to sunny Portugal, Shouyou was squirming like he had bugs under his skin. 

“Are we nearly there?” he finally exploded as they passed by yet another road sign pointing forwards, backwards and to the left respectively towards ‘Schweiz’, ‘Italien’ and ‘Frankreich’. 

“The good news is that we’re almost at the border.”

There was a loaded pause that felt as if Shouyou was steeling himself for some sort of bullshit from Tooru, which was frankly offensive. “And the bad news?” he asked warily.

“We still have hours of road before we even get out of the mountains.”

Shouyou stared at him, momentarily struck dumb. “How? On the map it looked so short!”

“Did you have a look at the path of the road on the map? Or only as the crow flies? No pun intended, of course.”

“What do you mean, the path of the road?” Shouyou asked, ignoring his transcendent humour. 

Tooru sighed and slowed the car to a crawl to take the 180 degree corner in front of them safely. “The road doesn’t go straight over the mountains, it loops almost back to the French border before it swings north through the westernmost part of Switzerland, then finally up to Bern. It’s not a quick drive.”

“Then why did you take us this way?” Shouyou was becoming more indignant with each question Tooru answered, and Tooru couldn’t help but feel he really didn’t deserve this particular scold.

“Because there’s literally no other way to get up to Bern without travelling through half of Italy and all of the other half of Switzerland.”

That seemed to floor Shouyou. He sat with his mouth open for a moment, eyes darting back and forth in confusion. “Then,” he said at last, “you knew how long it would take?”

Tooru shrugged, not liking the direction of this line of questioning. “I knew it might take a while to get over the mountains, I didn’t realise how bad these roads really were.” Shouyou’s brows remained furrowed and he sat staring down at his hands for the next few minutes. Tooru knew that he would regret asking what was on his mind so he stayed quiet and took the opportunity to focus on clearing the ridge of a particularly sharp peak, dusted with snow as fine as icing sugar.

As the sun began to slip downwards on the windscreen, Shouyou seemed to still be occupying his own world. Tooru tried to draw him back out by queueing songs that he usually loved to sing along to, but even as they came on Shouyou remained removed. Only after the third banger did he stir from his listlessness. 

“Was it because of me that you didn’t push us to go faster?”

Tooru tilted his head to the side and let his brow furrow questioningly, pretending not to know what Shouyou was talking about. 

“Don’t give me that look, you know what I mean. Did you slow us down because I was feeling homesick?”

Tooru took a moment to consider his options. On one hand, he could claim to be the good friend who was dedicated to making sure Shouyou was okay before moving them onwards, sacrificing ground covered for emotional support. It wasn’t a lie: he hated to see Shouyou upset and the last thing he wanted was for Shouyou to end up holed up by himself and stuck in his own head. 

On the other hand, he knew that Shouyou had seen that tiny part of him that didn’t ever want to arrive in Bern, and he wasn’t in the mood to be called out on it at the moment. 

“I knew it would take a little longer than I’d planned with all the stops we were making,” was what he settled on. 

“Yeah, but was it because of me being sad that you didn’t make us leave earlier? And let us stop at all those places along the way to try and cheer me up? Because you know how much it means to me that you get to Bern on time, and I’d hate it if I made you miss it and miss talking to Iwaizumi because I know how much that means to you.”

Tooru turned his face away guiltily. 

Shouyou squared his shoulders, and Tooru was momentarily struck by how broad they looked. “Well, whatever it is, I’m not going to let us stop until we get there.”

“That’s a physical impossibility, Shouyou.”

The red-head threw his hands into the air in exasperation. “Will you stop being so facetious, Tooru, you know what I meant! We’re going to get there in time if it’s the last thing I do and it’s my job to make sure nothing stops us.”

He paused for a moment, face stern, before the facade cracked and he peeked at Tooru from beneath his fringe. “Did I use the word ‘facetious’ right?”

Tooru bit down on a smile. “Yes you did, well done.”

Several hours later saw them finally pass through the border crossing. Tooru scrubbed his hand over his eyes tiredly and slowed once again to avoid slipping on the asphalt which had steadily been coated by a thin layer of snow. Shouyou had commented how weird it was to see snow in summer until Tooru had reminded him how high over the ocean they were, the air thin and cold around them. 

The drive along the ridge had taken as long as he’d feared and they were nowhere near clearing the mountain, as he’d hoped they would be by this stage. It was largely due to the difficulty of the roads and Tooru’s need to take the turns at a glacial pace to avoid skittering into the path of another truck during a momentary lapse of attention as, true to his word, Shouyou hadn’t let them stop for more than a few minutes at any rest stop. 

As a consequence, though, Tooru was exhausted. He knew that Shouyou wouldn’t be happy to hear they’d have to stop soon and would ask him if he was sure he didn’t have any more in the tank ‘in the spirit of adventure’. But he was very conscious that what he had been feeling for the past hour was strongly reminiscent of the night of their almost-accident, and he wasn’t willing to gamble with their lives as he had that night.

One more bone-cracking yawn and he decided that was it. He began looking along the road as far as he could for a suitable rest stop wide enough to take the VW safely. 

“I’m afraid that’s it for today, Sho, I’m fading fast. And before you ask me if I’m sure, I definitely am. I’ll be no use to man or beast in another couple of minutes.”

Shouyou paused, his mouth already opened on a protest. Then after a proper look at Tooru’s face he seemed to see the tiredness etched into the lines by his eyes and he relented. “Of course, you’ve been driving forever you must be shattered. I have snacks in my bag so we should be okay for dinner. Pull over and we can start again tomorrow, yeah?”

Finally spotting a shoulder wide enough to avoid having any part of the car sticking out onto the road, Tooru did just that. They climbed out and opened the door of the boot, settling into their practised routine of unfolding blankets and moving aside bags to make space for their bodies. As quickly as they could, they pulled the door closed behind them and rubbed their hands together to get some feeling back, the Seijoh-blue blanket spread out over their legs. 

As soon as they had finished their makeshift dinner and lay down, Tooru could feel the siren call of sleep beckoning him into oblivion. Before he could drift off entirely, though, he felt Shouyou stir beside him and roll onto the side facing Tooru.

“Do you think it’ll take long to get to Bern tomorrow?”

With a monumental effort Tooru dragged his eyelids open again. “I don’t know, Sho. Probably most of the day if the roads are like they were today.”

“So we’ll get there around afternoon time? I think the games end at 6 so we might even be able to watch the last few sets.”

“No, we’ll get to _Bern_ in the afternoon. We still need to drive through the city and find out where the stadium is; or, if the games are already finished, we’ll have to figure out where they’re staying. It’ll be a long day.” 

He paused, weighing what he was about to say carefully. “I mean, even if we don’t manage to get there by tomorrow evening it doesn’t matter too much. We can always try find some time to see them the day after before they move on.”

He felt Shouyou move abruptly under the blanket and glanced up to see him propped on his elbow, silhouetted against the moonlit window. “What do you mean? You know the plan was to get there tomorrow evening because we can’t be sure if we’ll have enough time the day after, I’m not even sure what time they leave or if they’re staying another night, what happens if we miss them?”

Tooru kept his eyes staring firmly in front of him at the faded fibreglass interior of the station wagon’s roof. “We won’t miss them. And if we do, then we spend some time in Bern to recoup. Isn’t that the point of adventures, sometimes you have to take detours?”

Shouyou was silent above him for a long moment. Then, “I don’t believe it. You’re not seriously okay with the fact that we might not be able to see Iwaizumi tomorrow, are you?”

“Look, I’m just trying to be realistic about this.”

“Bullshit.” At that, Tooru’s eyes snapped to the outline of Shouyou’s face. He’d never heard the younger man swear, and certainly never at him, and he was startled to find there were the beginning of real anger in his voice. “What, do you just not want to see him all of a sudden?”

“Of course I want to see him,” he snapped back, taking refuge in equal measures of anger. 

“Then why are you trying everything to avoid getting there in time to talk to him?”

“That’s not what I’m doing, Shouyou, but just in case the worst happens I’m trying to be okay with the idea that we might miss him— miss them.”

“That’s not what you’re doing either! It’s like you’re trying to talk yourself out of seeing him, this is exactly what you were doing on the night I saw you with that guy on the beach, you’ve persuaded yourself you can’t have him anymore so you’re letting him get away. It’s just like a— what do you call them? — oh yeah, self-fulfilling prophecy. You just need to go be with him and the rest will fall into place, you’ll see.” 

“This isn’t some sort of fairytale, Hinata,” Tooru yelled. It was the first time he’d truly raised his voice at the younger man and they both froze. When he spoke again, though his voice was much quieter it cut through the absolute silence within the cab. 

“This isn’t some adventure story where the hero is guaranteed to get his love, alright? This is my life. I broke up with him once before and it took weeks for me to feel anything again. So of course I want to see him, I want it more than almost anything I’ve ever wanted, but when I do it’s going to be like I never left him. So what happens to me if he says it was better after I left, and that I did us both a favour? It’s not as simple as just being with him and letting the rest fall into place if he doesn’t want me anymore.” 

After all, it was asking a lot of his poor heart to bear Hajime breaking it all over again a second time, and in its most private corner he was scared that he’d find out the hope he nurtured that Hajime felt the same was better than the reality that he didn’t.

He couldn’t see more than a shadow of the features on Shouyou’s face but he felt the muscles beside him relax. 

“You know, for someone so smart you’re also kinda stupid sometimes.” 

Tooru’s jaw dropped open. “Hah?” 

“I think everyone who isn’t you two must see what’s going on. Definitely anyone seeing you two together would figure out pretty quickly that you love each other, and people who only know you separately would take about as long to realise there was another someone on the other side of your thoughts, just like me and Daichi did. To answer your question of if I still think of my someone —yeah, sometimes they do just pop into my head when I’m not expecting it, and I just kinda have to wonder _what if_ , you know? You’ve spent six months away from Iwaizumi and you still think of him everyday. Is the Great King really going to let another six months go by without doing something about that?”

Tooru lay still for a moment, letting Shouyou’s works sink in and giving his thoughts a chance to reshape and sharpen.

Once again he was loath to admit that someone else was in the right. The anxiety gnawing at his chest still made it difficult to draw a full breath and he didn’t think he’d relaxed his stomach muscles totally since before they’d begun the climb.

But he was also, for better or for worse, the same Oikawa Tooru who had stood in front of Ushiwaka with his head held high after having just been defeated by Karasuno and told him to never forget his worthless pride. To give up now, on anything, when he was so close to having it, should be an affront to everything he was.

“If we want to get there by 6 we’ll need to leave quite early. And it’s going to take a full day of driving.”

Shouyou sighed, his relief palpable in the warm air between them. “Great, if that’s what we need to do then let’s do it.” Tooru could hear the smile in his voice, but it faltered slightly after a moment. “Wait, how early are we talking?” 

Tooru smiled grimly.

At 5:30 the next morning Tooru shook Shouyou’s shoulder gently to wake him, removing the leg that had been tossed over him in the process. They dressed quickly by the grey light of the dawn and were on the road, still rubbing sleep out of their eyes, by 6. One full day of driving left before Tooru could see Hajime, and he was over the crest of the mountain before the sun had fully risen in the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The wait is over; next chapter, prepare for the showdown ~~


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the showdown, pls hold onto your hats and enjoy, umbrellas available for light showers of angst and tears

Neither he nor Shouyou spoke much on the drive down the other side of the range, and even when they hit the flat lands of rural Switzerland their conversation mostly remained within the bounds of mundanity— comments about the scenery and jibes about Tooru’s taste in music. They stopped twice, once for breakfast and once for lunch, but aside from those handful of minutes spent the rest of the time in the car steadily eating away at the kilometres between them and Bern.

By early afternoon Tooru’s back was aching and his head felt like it was full of bees, but still they drove. Even as the sun began to set he kept his foot on the accelerator and let Shouyou’s inanities wash over him, the bass of Florence + the Machine’s _Breaking Down_ the only anchor for his scattered thoughts.

As the VW finally neared the city limits, the air in the cab became tense and Tooru began to feel as if his heart was about to jump out of his mouth. He queued some Tame Impala and some Rüfüs du Sol, both of which normally never failed to smooth his most tempestuous moods, but as he saw the lights of the city shimmering faintly on the horizon he supposed even their most transcendent music couldn't work miracles. 

Over the last hour he had developed something of a tic, glancing at the clock on the dashboard obsessively as it wound down to the hour of reckoning. Time was arbitrary and cruel, Tooru thought, obeying no logic but its own as it began to tick down faster now than it had all day. When they finally crossed over the arbitrary line on Google Maps signifying that they were within Bern city limits, the clock had just ticked over to 5.

Shouyou had searched on the Swiss Volleyball Association’s website to find the name of the arena where the Japanese teams would be playing, a large space almost on the other side of town, and as they finally joined the evening traffic heading in that direction the clock ticked closer to 5:30. 

“Ok, take a left at the end of this road,” Shouyou said, squinting at the minute screen of his archaic brick phone —which really had more in common with a semaphore than with Tooru’s sleek new smartphone. “Then you’re going to follow that road all the way to the end.” 

Tooru did as he was told, passing through the valleys between tall stone buildings. Occasionally they would hit cobbled streets and he would have to slow down, unsure if the VW could withstand the shakedown. As they reached the end of the long street, a green area opened up in front of them, a line of tall trees obscuring a perfectly maintained playing field from the road.

“Ok, there’s a parking lot up ahead if you bear right, you’re going to pull into that.” Tooru felt his heart plummet and his stomach twist itself into knots.

“We can’t be here already, surely?” He looked around them for something resembling a volleyball arena, but there were only the suburban streets to their right and the grassy complex as far as the eye could see to their left. 

“No, but apparently there are some public showers at this end of the park so we can have a quick shower and you can change before Iwaizumi sees you in that.”

Tooru was impressed. “Wow that’s actually really— hey wait, what’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” 

Shouyou cast his eyes doubtfully over the offending outfit —Tooru’s favourite black nike sweatpants, washed so often they were now a dull charcoal, and a soft grey sweater which hung shapelessly off his frame in the way only the most comfortable of baggy clothes could. He had begun to develop a headache late in the morning so had donned his glasses, which might, he still maintained, appeal to the more bookishly-inclined connoisseur. Tooru thought at least that the woollen Nordic-patterned socks he’d tucked the cuffs of the track pants into gave the outfit a certain charm, but the disapproving set of Shouyou’s mouth made him think otherwise. 

“Since when do I take fashion advice from you anyway,” he griped, climbing out of the car ungraciously and pulling his bag from the back seat.

“Since you looked more presentable on a beach for a guy you didn't even really like than for the guy you’re actually in love with.”

“Shut up, oh my god you’re the worst. Besides, it’s not like I got dressed up for that guy. I just got undressed for him—” He ducked laughingly to avoid the rolled up towel thrown at his head, but did as he was bid all the same and went to change. 

When he emerged again, he was shamelessly gratified with the double-take he received from his companion. These were his best jeans, tight over his thighs and ass in a way he knew bordered on wickedness. They were the ones he only brought out when he really needed to impress someone, and he knew they still worked by how Shouyou’s eyes dropped immediately to his legs. He’d tucked them into his black timberlands, but hadn’t yet risked bending over in the jeans to lace them up.

Once again he’d opted for a sweater, but this one was a deep blue cable-knit, and was much tighter over his shoulders and chest, hugging the taper of his waist and leaving very little to the imagination. He’d slipped on a white button-down beneath it, the tails of which were peaking out beneath the hem of the sweater, but had left the top buttons undone so that the cut of his collarbones was still visible above the boat-neck collar. 

He’d also taken a comb to his hair, and it now lay in soft waves over his forehead rather than in the messy birds’ nest it had been before which suggested he hadn’t slept properly in a week. As a final touch, he’d opted to leave the glasses on his face because he knew what it did to Hajime to see him in them, and he’d take any edge he could get at this point.

Satisfied with the reaction he was getting from his captive audience as well as from a late-evening jogger whose head swivelled to watch him, he smirked and headed back towards the car. “Shall we go?”

As soon as he sat back down though, his bravado wavered. The clock was now showing a handful minutes past six so the games should have just wrapped up. Yet despite the fact that this was the closest he had been to Hajime in over half a year Tooru was having trouble feeling anything other than mild nausea. 

“The venue is ten minutes away,” Shouyou said, voice loud in the musicless cab, “so it’s not far now. Turn left when you get out of here, then right straight away.” 

His hands followed Shouyou’s directions easily, leaving his brain free to spiral into a chaos of Hajime montages; Hajime talking, Hajime smiling, Hajime crying, Hajime kissing, Hajime Hajime HajimeHajimeHajime— He tried to calm his breathing as it started to get away from him, count of three in, count of two hold, count of five out, but he didn’t want to draw Shouyou’s attention by gasping in breaths like a drowning man. All this stress was going to turn him grey, he just knew it, and what he would look like with a bald spot he couldn’t even imagine—

The next thing Tooru knew they were arriving at the arena and his hands were pulling the car into a park in the first row facing the entrance. 

Fingers moving of their own accord, he turned off the engine and killed the lights. As he watched, a few spectators pushed open the doors to head back to their cars, stragglers late leaving the courts. Their bright scarves, colourful banners and excited chatter was anathema to the sombre grey of the dusk falling around them, but the fact that spectators were still here at all meant that the teams hadn’t yet left the venue. 

Tooru felt both hot and cold, burning for Hajime now that his body was so close to what it wanted, and freezing in the way he was suddenly unable to feel his lips or the tips of his fingers. He thought that Shouyou laid a hand on his forearm and maybe even squeezed it comfortingly, but when the door swung open again after several minutes of nothing, a wooly mammoth could have walked past and Tooru wouldn’t have noticed. 

Over the course of the evening the clear sky had begun to darken with brewing rain clouds, but the warm lights flooding the car park just outside the door of the venue cast Hajime’s face into full relief as he stepped out ahead of his teammates. 

Tooru sat frozen, watching as the handful of players in their various uniforms broke up into smaller groups and waved goodbye to one another as they headed in different directions. Hajime stood with his own group for a moment, then as one they turned away from the venue and from their teammates, bags slung over their shoulders. One metre, two, then five; they continued to walk away from the rest of their team and consequently away from where Tooru was sitting staring at them through the windscreen, unable to move his hands or his feet.

Then Shouyou nudged him, hard, and he jolted back to life. He flung the door open and stepped out, taking an impetuous step towards his childhood best friend. 

“Iwa!” 

Hajime froze mid-step, and it would have been funny if Tooru’s heart wasn’t hammering fit to burst out of his ribcage. Slowly, Hajime turned to face him, a look of absolute shock stripping his face bare. 

“Oikawa?” 

That was disbelief, so strong that it looked as if Hajime was about to scrub his hand over his eyes like they did in the movies. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” 

“I, ah.” The rest of Hajime’s group had come to a stop by now too, and Tooru only just realised that it was made up of all familiar faces, including those of Sawamura, Tobio, Fukurodani’s pale-haired ace, and none other than his nemesis, Ushiwaka. He could have wished for a less captive audience, but in the second of attention he spared them it seemed that all but one was as surprised to see him as he was to see them. 

“How did you know I was here? Wait, are those Portuguese plates on that car?”

“Um. Well.” Hajime’s voice was bleeding from disbelief into incredulity, and still Tooru couldn't seem to get his tongue to work properly. 

“Oikawa, did you drive all the way from Porto to see me tonight?” The words were sweet but the tone was anything but, the threat of menace, the _you better not have,_ clear in the way Hajime took a deliberate step towards him. Tooru couldn’t handle this right now: it was too little and too much after such a long time building it up in his mind, and he did the only sensible thing he could think of.

He spun back to the car door which had closed behind him, trying to get back inside and away from Hajime’s judgement, away from the harsh tone of his voice and maybe back to a space where he didn’t need to explain his feelings all over again. The car handle wouldn’t budge, though, and when he looked back through the window at the traitor sitting within who had the gaul to shrug powerlessly, he realised that Shouyou had locked the door behind him for this exact reason. 

He send his Brutus a withering glare and subtly drew his finger across his throat before straightening up again and turning back to Hajime. In an effort to act as if he hadn’t just tried to dive back into the car he swept his hand awkwardly through his tousled hair, but the unimpressed look on Hajime’s face told him he’d been seen. 

As he opened his mouth to finally say something intelligible, he heard Tobio mutter, “Wait, is that Hinata in the car? What the hell?” It was as good a reminder as any that they were far from alone, and he cleared his throat before saying in what he thought was an admirably steady voice, “Can I talk to you, Iwa?”

To what would become Tooru’s eternal surprise, Ushiwaka stepped forward and cleared his throat unobtrusively. “Perhaps we should go to that bar you were talking about, Daichi. I think it’s time we get out of here.” How this robot had learned the art of tact Tooru would never know, but he supposed if he had to be grateful to the man for something in his life, giving him the chance to talk to Hajime in private may as well be it. 

“Yes, that’s a very good idea,” Sawamura said quickly; “come on guys we’re heading off now. You too, Hinata; it’s good to see you, by the way. I think you need to tell us all about this road trip of yours over a couple of sodas, come on let’s leave them to it, alright you give him the keys but then we really need to go.” In this manner he managed the wrangle the rest of the group away from where Hajime and Tooru still stood facing each other, unable to take their eyes away. 

Tooru could feel Shouyou staring at the side of his face and he made an abortive motion with his hand that might have been a wave to let him know it was okay to go. Before Sawamura led the others away into the labyrinth of city streets bordering the arena, he paused and walked back to Hajime. “I’ll take your bag,” he said, pulling the object in question from his unresisting grip. He squeezed Hajime’s shoulder reassuringly, and Tooru could see that he meant it in an _I’ve got your back, whatever happens_ kind of way, which didn’t do much to reassure Tooru’s nerves.

At last he said, “I’ll see you later, okay, you know where to meet us.” Then, sparing only a second to send Tooru a small smile before once again turning his back, he was gone and silence returned.

“Do you want to walk?” 

Hajime nodded unsteadily, brows still knit tightly over his stormy green eyes, but he let Tooru guide him to another street where the streetlamps illuminated the first droplets of mizzle falling from the sky.

They walked the length of the street, then turned onto another and began to walk the length of that one too. 

“I can’t believe you drove all the way here in that piece of crap station wagon,” Hajime grumbled after a while. “Do you have a death wish or something?”

Tooru wrinkled his brow. “Are you seriously insulting my ride? What are you, twelve?” 

“At least tell me you let that Karasuno pipsqueak drive some of the way.”

“Well he doesn’t have his licence yet, so _no_ mum I didn’t.”

“Unbelievable,” Hajime muttered under his breath. Then: “I bet you thought it was real romantic to sleep in the back of that thing, I can just imagine you shivering under a mountain of blankets for the sake of aesthetic because all the gaps let in the wind.” He seemed to recollect that Tooru hadn’t been alone and turned his face away awkwardly. “Although I guess you had the kid there with you, too.” 

“Yeah well, you, Sawamura, Tobio and Ushiwaka seem a regular old set of Musketeers so I’m not the only one fraternising with the enemy.”

“I guess a lot can change in six months, huh.”

The conversation abruptly died, but despite the fact that they stood side by side with their shoulders occasionally brushing, the silence between them was far from peaceful.

Finally, Hajime was the one to break it with a deep sigh. “What are you really doing here, Tooru?” 

Tooru looked up at him, trying to catch his gaze to get a sense of what he was feeling, but he kept his eyes turned resolutely downwards at the cobbles. The use of his first name was an encouraging sign though, and he drew in a breath.

“I came to see you.” 

“Why, though?” 

The question stung, but Tooru swallowed the hurt and tried to keep his voice level as he responded. He hadn’t come so far to stumble at the final hurdle, he reminded himself.

“Why do you think? I missed you.” 

“You missed me?” At that Hajime’s brow creased further and he stuffed his hands in his pockets. “So you could have FaceTimed me, you didn’t have to drive all the way here to say that.”

“Is that what you would have preferred?” 

Hajime huffed out a parody of a laugh. “Oh, so now we’re asking me what I would have preferred?” 

That did more than sting, and Tooru reeled back.

“What do you mean by that?” He tried to hide the hurt in his words with a veneer of affrontery, but as always he was sure Hajime saw through him. 

They had reached another intersection of cobbled streets, the two-storey stone buildings on either side of them casting long shadows that the streetlamps couldn't quite keep at bay. Hajime’s feet drew to a stop in the circle cast onto the street by one, and the droplets of rain caught on his clothes and in his hair glowed gold in the reflected light. 

“You can’t just come back anytime you might miss me or feel like you could want me again and expect things to go back to how they were before, Tooru. So I’ll ask you again, what are you doing here?” 

Tooru felt as if he’d been slapped, but finally the flicker of true anger that lit his chest at the words succeeded in melting his frozen tongue. “‘Feel like I could want you again?’” he parroted incredulously. “I’ve done nothing _but_ want you back since the day you left.” 

“ _I_ left?” Great, now Hajime was angry too. Any hope he had cherished that this would be a calm and easy reunion flew out the proverbial window. “Are we really going to do this, Tooru?”

“We’re really going to do this, Hajime. I think it’s about time you actually talked to me rather than running off and refusing to acknowledge your feelings like usual.”

“I wasn’t the one who took it on himself to get as far away from Japan as possible without telling anybody, Tooru, this is not on me.” Hajime’s fury was the opposite of Tooru’s, fire where Tooru’s was ice, and loud where Tooru’s was dagger-soft. 

“You told me you would follow me anywhere,” Tooru gritted out through clenched teeth, “how was I supposed to know when push came to shove you didn’t really mean that?”

“You never gave me the chance! By the time you’d made up your mind that you were off to Portugal, without even telling me you’d applied I might add, and when you _knew_ I couldn’t afford to go with you, all there was left for me to do was watch you go and get over you. Now you’re back and you’re telling me you _miss me_ like we’re in a Taylor Swift video or something; frankly it’d be funny if I wasn’t so mad at you.” 

Please let there be more to it than this. Let there be something behind this anger, some emotion other than bitterness and resentment that might give Tooru a way back in, don’t let him be forced to watch the man he loved walk away again _please_.

“So what are you really back for, huh?” Hajime continued. “Are you even here to see me or were you just passing through and thought you’d stop in and say hey? Is this just another stop on the way to somewhere you’d rather be?” There it was, that uncertain crack in his voice, there was the still-raw hurt that Hajime was trying so hard to hide because it gave away a little too much. Tooru could almost cheer. 

Then Hajime kept talking. 

“Or did you just get sick of the boys in your part of the world and think you’d come back for a bit of something nostalgic? Guess you’re a lot more keen for a quick screw when the person doesn’t mean as much, huh. Are there even any people left there that you haven't fucked yet?” 

“Wh-what?” Tooru spluttered, enraged and agonised. “Why are you saying that?” 

Hajime scoffed. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve been sitting at home chaste and tearful every night missing me? Because I know you, Tooru, don't forget that.” 

The regrettable image of the boy beneath him on that beach in Italy flashed across his inner eye, and Hajime must have read the hesitation on his face because he sneered. 

“That’s not what this is about,” Tooru said, an angry flush spreading high on his cheeks. He felt off-balance, angry and hurt by the accusation but unable to totally refute what Hajime was implying.

“Then what is this about?” Hajime asked unkindly.

“It’s about how no matter where I am or what I’m doing, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the world that can get me to stop thinking about you and it's driving me _crazy_. Though God knows why at this point, since apparently you’re set on making me hate you.” The vitriol in those last two words, born from the hurt which had been festering ever since Hajime all but told him he wasn’t enough, felt bitter on Tooru’s tongue. 

“Then _why_ ? If you’re so set on hating me _why_ are you still thinking of me, that doesn’t make any sense! Just do us both a favour and forget me, since _apparently_ —” he crooked his fingers in faux-quotation marks in a mockery of Tooru’s earlier use —“our friendship isn’t good enough anymore if you can’t get a leg over too.”

“How dare you! I’m here because I’m still in love with you! I never fucking _stopped_ loving you.” 

The world ground to a halt, holding its breath in suspense as the ears of every moth and mite within a kilometre radius strained to hear Hajime’s response. Or that’s how it would have been if the world loved Tooru Oikawa.

“Yeah? Well you could have fooled me.” 

Tooru’s world shattered and he stood, vacant and drained, for a long moment before turning away from the inferno in Hajime’s eyes. His hands hung loosely by his sides but his chin stayed up, jaw firm, his pride which had once been dismissed as worthless the only thing keeping him from breaking down there and then. 

He began to walk, heart breaking and neck burning as he tried to stop himself from looking back one more time to see if Hajime was watching him go. His eyes burned, tears beginning to collect on his lashes before the first one fell onto his cheek, disguised by the rain. 

Before he’d made it five steps, he heard Hajime sigh and shuffle his feet. 

“Tooru, wait.” 

Tooru kept walking. The tears had begun to fall in earnest now, and though he didn’t know where he was going or what he would do now, he knew that he would be damned before he let Hajime see him cry. 

There were quick footsteps behind him, and he had half-turned to glance over his shoulder when he was hauled around to face a very conflicted-looking Hajime.

“Wh-what the hell do you think you’re doing, let me go!” Tooru’s voice rose and he tried to tug back the arm restrained in Hajime’s vice-like grip.

“Tooru, don’t walk away, we weren’t done talking.” Tooru knew that he could read that as an apology —there was contrition in Hajime’s voice, along with no little amount of frustration, and it was clear that he regretted losing his temper. 

Tooru was tired, though, and sick of being yelled at as if Hajime was the only one who had had to endure the last six months in pain. 

He ripped his arm away and stepped back, roughly dashing the back of his other hand over his cheeks. “I think we were.”

Hajime let his head fall back in exasperation. “Oh come on, Tooru, just listen—”

“No, you listen,” Tooru exploded, shoving Hajime in the chest, hard. He tried not to hear the harsh exhale of breath that the action forced from Hajime’s lungs. 

“You’ve been telling me all about how much I’ve hurt you and how you have all these reasons to be angry with me. I don’t care if you’re angry at me, you have every right, but don’t you _dare_ assume that I don’t have just as much right to be angry at you too, and hurt.” 

Hajime stood frozen, one hand on his chest and his face a mask of shock. Tooru barrelled on.

“You all but forced me to stop playing hard court and you promised me that we’d play soft court together or that we’d go some place where they played both so we could be together while my knee healed. Then next thing I hear, you’ve been accepted into a V-League team, and you’re expecting me to come to every game and every tournament. And I go, because I love you and I’m proud of you. But you don’t _once_ ask me how I’m feeling or what it’s doing to my head to watch you play knowing that I might _never_ be able to join you. On the contrary, you asked me if I would put a brace on and spend a night serving at your receivers so they could get used to different power serves. Do you know what _that_ kind of betrayal feels like, Hajime?” 

Hajime was still gaping at him in shock. “Tooru… you were the one who told me I should aim for the V-League. I thought you were happy for me.”

“Yes, but I meant with me! You told me we’d stand on the same court; were you so keen to go on ahead that you couldn’t wait for me to catch up?” 

He was panting now, so angry and hurt anew that tears began to fall again. 

“And then when I found a world-famous beach league that would take me, in a country in the heart of the European hard court alliance, you told me there’s ‘ _nothing for you_ ’ there. So you forced me to choose between you and volleyball, like all my high school flings made me do. You knew what my answer was back then, why were you surprised when I chose the same thing again this time?” 

He fell silent then, words exhausted and emotional reserves empty. 

“Fuck,” Hajime said eloquently after a moment, all the fight gone from his voice. “I —fuck.”

Tooru wasn’t sure he had any tears left in him, but an angry little sniff confirmed that he was still crying, silent rivulets of tears slipping down his cheeks.

“God,” Hajime said, taking an impetuous step forward, “don’t cry Tooru, please. You look awful when you cry.”

Tooru reared back and clenched his fists. “Well in that case I’m sorry you have to see me looking so _disgusting_ , I guess I’ll take myself out of your presence—”

Hajime made a sound of frustration deep in his throat. “That’s not what I meant and you know it, Tooru, how am I the bad guy when I just hate watching you cry?”

“Well for someone who hates it, you seem to be very good at causing it.”

“That’s not fair—”

“And,” he forged on, staunchly ignoring the pained crease in Hajime’s brow, “you’re the bad guy when you fling my past in my face and call me a slut. How could you say those things?” 

He knew he should shut up, should stop goading Hajime and let it rest so they could go away and lick their wounds, but this was the most reaction he’d had from him since the day of their fight, and, like a child acting out desperately for attention, he couldn’t let this go just yet.

“You were the one who used to flaunt your body count in front of me to make me jealous and possessive, Tooru; have a little perspective and try to imagine how that made me feel.”

Tooru flinched. When he spoke again his voice was a little smaller, much to his chagrin. “I just wanted to make sure you still wanted me. You never told me, you just called me names and told me I was a dumbass.”

Hajime was silent then, and Tooru began to panic. He cast about desperately for something else to throw out to keep Hajime there with him a little longer, not sure now that the moment was here if he really could watch his best friend walk away again. 

“God, this is so messed up.” All of a sudden Hajime sounded very old, passing his hand over his eyes as if he couldn’t handle much more of this. Tooru knew how he felt.

“Yeah.” Tooru tried to stay angry, to hold onto the righteous fury which had kept his back unbowed, but he was just so _tired_. What a thing to be hated by the person you loved. Maybe it was time to call it a day.

“We’ve made a right mess of this, haven’t we?”

“I-I guess so.” He clenched his fists at his sides, wishing he was safe and warm in the back on the VW on some nameless and aimless country road in rural obscurity.

Hajime took a step closer and he tensed, unsure if he should expect a headbutt or another fight. He could deal with either, he told himself. If he had to make himself hate Hajime to save himself from shattering, then he’d be able to do it. Probably. Maybe. 

Then Hajime was wrapping his long, strong arms around Tooru’s shoulders, and Tooru froze in absolute shock. This wasn’t what he had expected at _all_ , and he thought for a moment that he must have gone crazy and started hallucinating, because there was no reasonable explanation for the way it felt to have Hajime’s hand stroke the hairs at the base of his skull.

He stayed tensed for one second longer, one second to remember all the hurt, the pain this man had caused him and the love and the _hate_ that he felt for him, before he was melting into his arms.

“God, I never wanted to hurt you Tooru, I’m so sorry for not talking to you before I tried out.” He pulled Tooru close to him, smoothing his hand in a long line down Tooru’s back then back up to cup the back of his head. 

“Me neither, me too, I should have told you— everything, I should have told you everything.”

Tooru worked himself closer still, tucking himself against Hajime’s chest until he could feel his steady heartbeat through the layers of their clothing. Even pressed together as they were with barely a whisper of air between them, it could never be enough to quench the longing that had been building up inside him. 

“I’ve been so angry at you for so long, Christ what a jackass I’ve been to you. How did we fuck up so badly when I love you _so much_ —”

Even though Tooru could feel the rumble of words against his chest as Hajime spoke, when Hajime said those words that he had been aching to hear for _so long_ his first thought was that he was for sure hallucinating because nothing in real life could feel so perfect. The press of lips to his temple only seemed like further proof. 

They stood close, wrapped around each other and whispering shaky apologies into each other’s skin, Hajime with his fingers stroking through Tooru’s hair and Tooru with his arms locked tightly around Hajime’s waist, despite the fact that he was taller by several centimetres.

They drew back after a long moment, the mizzle shrouding them becoming heavier and turning the glow of the streetlamps into a golden blur. Tooru watched as a droplet of water ran down the plane of Hajime’s cheek. Then, after a moment of searching each other’s faces, Tooru pressed back in and brought his lips down to meet Hajime’s.

The first touch was like coming home, like the sun after a storm, all the things he hadn’t told Shouyou. Their mouths slotted together sweetly, coming together and breaking apart with dry little sounds of separation. Hajime swept his fingers down Tooru’s throat to take him by the shoulder for a better angle, and Tooru opened his mouth to sigh into the kiss.

As they drew apart for a breath, Tooru flicked his tongue out to wet his own lips, and when they came together again the kiss was a little wetter, a little less sweet. Hajime made a tiny sound in the back of his throat, tilting his head to open his mouth a little in return, while Tooru tucked himself more firmly against his chest and tightened the grip he had on his waist. 

A nearby cough and the click of high heels on cobblestones made them spring apart. A lady under a large red umbrella gave them a knowing look as she walked past, one thin eyebrow raised. “Guten Abend,” she said, and it sounded to Tooru’s ears a little like an accusation. 

“Guten— guten Abend,” they mimicked, cheeks flushing as they glanced at each other. 

“Come on, we should get to the bar,” Hajime murmured once she had been obscured by the curve of the street. He put his arm on Tooru’s shoulder and tried to turn him back the way they had come.

Tooru resisted for a moment, brow creasing. 

“What’s the rush, we could spend a moment longer here, surely.”

“Tooru, if we stay here much longer we’re going to be soaked to the bone. Let’s go so we can warm up and check in with the others.” 

Only then did Tooru realise how heavily it was drizzling now, and he grudgingly allowed Hajime to take his hand and pull him down the street. 

As they passed by the avenue which led to the arena, he tried again. “Hey, couldn’t we maybe just take a moment—”

“Look, I know we still have more to talk about,” Hajime interrupted, “and I’m not brushing you off. But I’m actually freezing and I don’t think either of us can afford to get sick right now, so we’ll talk more later after we see the others, okay?”

Tooru supposed it was the best he was going to get. 

Then, as they turned onto the Main Street, a thought occurred to him. “Hey, did you ever tell any of them about us?” he asked cautiously. They hunched their shoulders against the sudden gust of wind and Hajime pulled his hand back to draw his hood over his head. Tooru immediately mourned its loss. 

“A few of them know we used to date, I guess. Why, are you worried they’ll try give you the Talk, threaten to break your fingers, that kind of thing?”

Tooru huffed a laugh, muttered “Don’t be ridiculous” with a toss of his hair, but he couldn’t help the twist of anxiety in his gut when he thought of how Hajime’s teammates might think of him.

As they arrived at a bar where Tooru assumed Hajime knew the others would be waiting, they paused for a moment outside the door. Hajime must have sensed his nervousness because he drew him in for a final kiss, huddled close in their own private bubble of streetlamps and cobblestones, before pulling away and opening the door.

At least Shouyou would be happy to see him, he thought as they stepped through, but he wasn’t going to spend the night hanging off him when he knew the kid must be ecstatic to see his old teammates.

The bar was brightly lit, yellow bulbs casting a welcoming glow over the interior, and as they shook the water from their hair and stepped further in, a loud shout met their ears.

“Hey guys, over here! We saved you some seats!”

Tooru looked across the bar to where the pale-haired wing-spiker he thought was called Boku-something stood over a table crammed with so many beefy volleyball players it looked like a frat reunion. The rest of the bar was similarly crowded, though, so it was a miracle they had a table at all. He hesitated to approach them, not seeing Shouyou’s distinctive red bird’s nest, but then the ex-ace of Fukurodani was gesturing to an empty spot on the bench at the other side of the table and Hajime was grinning and striding towards them.

“Nice, Bo. Who did you have to fight to get this table?”

By this stage, the rest of the table had abandoned any pretence of subtlety and had turned to stare at them as they approached. The crowd had grown slightly since they’d left the arena, with several more faces that he knew and a couple he didn’t. By the looks of it, most of them were ex-Karasuno, but there was a very pretty dark-haired man to Bo’s left whom he didn't recognise, wearing the most taciturn expression Tooru had ever seen on anyone who wasn’t Mattsun. 

Several of them were looking openly between him and Hajime, as if trying to decipher the words that had passed between them, and Tooru decided that if he was going to become a spectacle then he’d damn well do a good job of it.

“Are we sure that fighting was what he did to get it?” he asked in his silkiest voice. “I mean, he’s still wearing his knee-pads, after all.”

Sawamura snorted into his beer, and beside him the silver-haired setter who had been Kageyama’s senpai in high school stifled his laugh behind his hand. Tooru imagine this was who Sawamura had meant when he said ‘get a few of the old gang back together.’ 

Bo tilted his head and frowned slightly in incomprehension. “What do my knee pads have to do with— oh, I get it! But nah I’d rather have fought for it, I only do that for Keiji.” 

He waggled his arched brows at Tooru and stretched a hand out to clap Hajime on the shoulder as he drew within range. To his left, the dark-haired man buried his face, now flushed bright red, in his arms, but the rest of the table exploded into jeers and hoots of mirth. The atmosphere began to thaw as Hajime and Tooru were welcomed into the circle. 

As he neared the bench where their seats had been saved, Tooru caught the welcome sight of red hair. 

He walked up behind Shouyou and reached over the back of his chair to put both of his palms on Shouyou’s cheeks and smoosh them together, looking down at him from directly above.

“Tooru!” he cried as best he could through his squished cheeks. “I didn't see you come in I was talking to Kageyama, I was telling him how cool it’s going to be when I can speak two languages and he can barely speak one still. What do you think?” 

Tooru looked to the man seated by Shouyou’s left elbow and smirked down at him. “You really need to catch up, Tobio, we’ll all beat you at this stage.” The sullen scowl, so habitual during his younger years it was practically a calling card, was back in place on Tobio’s face. He grumbled that he could if he wanted but maybe he was happy staying exclusively Japanese if it meant being on the other side of the world to Oikawa-san, thank you very much. 

Tooru laughed and moved to slide in on Shouyou’s right, in between him and Hajime, who had already sat down. He tried to shuffle in so that he wasn’t in any way on top of Shouyou’s lap, but this meant that he was now pressed bodily against Hajime, from shoulder to knee and at every place in between. He cleared his throat, suddenly unable to raise his eyes to look at his best friend.

Instead, he turned back to Shouyou and Tobio, who, as a pair, made a much easier target to tease. Ignoring the way Shouyou had propped his chin on his palm and was gazing wraptly between him and Hajime, he jerked his chin at the pink drink in front of them.

“So did you get me one too, or have you been too distracted staring into Tobio’s eyes?”

Shouyou squeaked and wheeled backwards, as Tooru knew he would. 

“What’s that supposed to mean, why would he be staring at me?” Tobio asked warily at the same moment Shouyou said, “No, of course not! I just didn’t know what you wanted, here share mine.”

“No I was just teasing, Shouyou, I’m not going to steal your drink.”

“No, here, it’s too strong for me anyway I need you to have some, you're much better at strong drinks than me. Come on Tooru, you know what I’m like with them, don’t you remember La Spezia?” Tooru raised an eyebrow and tilted his head in concession, allowing himself to be persuaded as he sucked the neon pink liquid through the straw between his lips. Then, as an idea hit him, he shot a mischievous look at the pair to his left and licked a droplet from his bottom lip. 

“You know, in a way this is like an indirect kiss,” he murmured conversationally. To his delight, he watched as both became bright red, Shouyou no doubt from mortification and Tobio possibly from apoplexy, possibly from a little of something else. Teasing Shouyou had become a favourite pastime of his, and he had realised with a jolt as he’d been getting dressed earlier that this may be one of the last opportunities to indulge.

He settled back to watch for now, regarding the small slices of life that were playing out around him and enjoying the spectacle while simultaneously studiously ignoring the way Hajime felt pressed against him as he talked to his teammates on his other side. 

He felt off-balance in this company, unsure how to act and what he was allowed to do. The kisses he had been given were soft and sweet, but they were also private and, in a way, clandestine. If Hajime wanted to keep this between them a little longer he was in no position, metaphorically and literally, to force it out in the open.

He felt a firm nudge against his left leg and looked down to meet Shouyou’s insistent gaze. He leaned forward towards Tooru and raised his eyebrows slightly, mouth curving hopefully as he flitted his eyes towards Hajime then back to Tooru inquiringly. It was clear what he was asking, and Tooru spared a moment to glance at Hajime himself before turning back and shooting Shouyou a reassuring smile. 

The way the kid’s brows drew together slightly and his own smile slipped made Tooru think he’d been less convincing than he thought. God, this reconciliation gig was harder than it ever looked in books. The movies were so full of shit.

Hajime hadn’t looked back at him since they’d sat down, too engrossed in his conversation with his teammates. Bo had saved him a beer, by the look of tall glass thrust into his hand, and the way he currently sat with his left elbow propped on the table neatly shut Tooru out of his conversation.

Tooru wasn’t petty enough to think that he was doing it on purpose, but the uncertainty he felt sitting here beside Hajime, their skin still damp from the rainstorm they’d just been fighting under, made his stomach flip.

What he wouldn’t give to just steal Hajime away, back to their own private twilight where he didn’t need to worry about eyes on him. Shouyou bumped a knee against his again and he glanced back down at him, mouth open and smile ready to divert the younger man’s attention away from his own unease—

He felt a hand on his right knee, the one currently pressed against Hajime, squeezing then sliding up higher until the pinky brushed against the intimate curve where his thigh met his body. He sucked in a breath, forgetting all of what he was about to say as he glanced up to where Hajime was already looking back at him, lips curving up in a private smile.

The hand stayed where it was, not straying any higher but instead squeezing gently as Tooru involuntarily let out what was definitely not a giggle. It wasn’t a lascivious move, not designed to tease or torment, but Tooru became flustered all the same as Hajime’s thumb began to rub circles on his inner thigh. 

Tooru turned back to Shouyou quickly, realising he hadn’t answered the implied question. Shouyou was still watching him, but there was a knowing glint in his eyes now, and he seemed content to just smile at Tooru rather than expecting an answer. Tooru couldn’t help the slight flush that brushed the top of his cheekbones at being so easily caught out, but he only offered a small eye roll and a smile in return.

He glanced once more up at Hajime, catching the involuntary quirk of his lips as he felt himself being observed and fighting down the urge to lean forwards and press a kiss the corner of that devilish mouth. The way Hajime leaned into him without taking his eyes away from his teammate’s animated storytelling made Tooru think Hajime was thinking just the same thing.

“Hey, Oikawa,” a voice called lightly, snapping him out of his trance. Sugawara was smiling mischievously at him from his place by Sawamura’s side. “How drunk do we have to get you to see another rendition of Kylie Minogue, or is dancing saved for road trips only?” 

Tooru’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second and beside him Shouyou began to choke on his drink; then he felt the first genuine grin split his face and he let his head tip to the side. 

“I’ll dance to anything if the pay is right.” The wink he sent the pair made Sawamura bring his hand up to cover his eyes with a muttered “Oh my God”, but Sugawara seemed delighted. 

Finally, he allowed himself to relax back into his chair and talk to the players around him while Hajime’s thumb continued its slow rhythm of rubbing back and forth over the curve of his thigh. 

The more he teased and flirted, laughing at the increasingly ridiculous innuendos they were throwing out and talking about the people who couldn't be there tonight, the more he felt like himself. 

When the other end of the table began to take an interest in their conversation, Hajime took the opportunity to turn and brush a kiss under Tooru’s ear. He bit down on a smile and refused to look at the rapturous stare he could feel boring into him from the left, chasing after the intimate bubble Hajime had created around them for a second. 

As the evening lengthened into night and a few among them began to amble off to their beds, Tooru became bolder, sliding his own fingers over Hajime’s thigh to brush against the seam at the front of his track pants. His touches were less comforting than Hajime’s had been, more exploratory as he chased whatever intimacy he could, but still he restrained himself in their mixed company. The haze of the lamplight outside and the warmth between them as they stayed pressed against each other lulled him into feeling as if their private bubble was still shrouding them from the world, but the constant jostling from his right as Shouyou teased Tobio let him know they were far from alone. 

It was getting more and more difficult to remember that.

All evening he had been conscious of the heat beside him, the warm masculine body that was all Hajime pressed to his side, smelling like spice and sun and sin and all of Tooru’s best memories. It had been comforting to begin with, but now, with all of their companions who were still in the bar wrapped up in each other, Tooru began to feel an itch under his skin that was calling out for him to be alone with Hajime.

As Shouyou moved away from them momentarily to run his fingers playfully through Tobio’s hair, messing up his carefully constructed middle part, Tooru took the opportunity to slide his fingers up higher and cup Hajime fully through the thin layer of his pants.

Hajime hissed and moved his other hand to wrap his fingers around Tooru’s wrist, frowning gaze flicking warningly up to his face. Tooru met his eyes head on, a challenge within his own as he deliberately ground his palm down. Hajime’s lips parted slightly and he let out a ragged breath as his eyelids drooped over rapidly darkening eyes. 

He kept his fingers around Tooru’s wrist, but they remained loose and uninhibitive as Tooru began to tease his fingers over the bulge beneath them. When Tooru began to squeeze, though, he did pull the hand away, biting down on his own lip and looking at Tooru’s mouth as if he’d much rather be biting there. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Tooru murmured into his ear, and the resulting shiver Tooru felt run through his body was gratifying. They got up together, too hasty and uncoordinated to disguise the eagerness they both felt, but there weren’t enough people around anymore to judge them and the ones who were there had undoubtedly been expecting this.

Speaking of—

“I’m going now,” he murmured to Shouyou, bending over the back of the chair to speak directly into his ear. “Are you going to be okay?” 

The smile Shouyou turned on him was blinding and more than a little mischievous. “I’ll be just fine, I’ll find a room no problem. I would ask the same, but I think I know the answer.” Tooru tangled his fingers in Shouyou’s hair and pushed his head away, closer to where Tobio was watching them warily. 

“Don’t be cheeky,” he said, glancing across at where Hajime was motioning to Sawamura. The ex-captain was smiling knowingly and waved a hand at them in a gesture that said _get out of here_ , gesturing to Sugawara beside him. “And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” 

Shouyou snorted, but before he could give voice to whatever grade school comeback he was no doubt formulating, Tobio reclaimed his attention grumpily. 

Tooru smiled and followed Hajime outside to where the rain had blessedly stopped falling, but when they turned away from the bar he asked, “What was that with Sawamura?”

“I was meant to be rooming with Daichi,” Hajime explained, “but I guess he’ll be staying with Sugawara since Sugawara came all the way from his placement in the UK to see him. So it looks like it’s just you and me.”

Tooru hummed quietly, biting his lip as he allowed Hajime to guide him down the street with a hand hovering low on his back. When Hajime took his hand away Tooru bit down on a plaintive sound, and as they walked through the tall arch of the hotel’s facade and into the elevator he made sure to brush up against Hajime’s front in revenge. 

Then Hajime was opening the door to his room, hands steady and gaze locked on what he was doing, profile so severe it looked like he had been clenching his teeth the whole walk back.

Tooru stood just inside the door, all of the bravado from the bar leaving him in a rush now that they were alone. His throat clicked as he swallowed, and as Hajime closed the door behind them the air between them suddenly felt thick and heavy. They remained frozen for a long moment, neither of them moving towards the other, and Tooru began to worry he’d moved too fast. 

Then he heard Hajime exhale hard and felt him step up right behind Tooru, cutting the space between them down to nothing. His hands came around Tooru to wrap around his lower belly and he buried his face in Tooru’s neck, drawing a surprised breath out of him as he began littering kisses up and down the soft skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we know where the next chapter is headed. Hope you loved reading this like I loved writing it, eternal thanks to Antiquity for helping me make this as painful as possible for both of them


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who’s invested in this story :) This is the last full-length chapter, next update will be a short epilogue to wrap up this little adventure. This chapter is like 90% smut and 10% feelings + plot so enjoy and let me know how you like the ending and come cry with me over happy iwaoi!

“God, I’ve been waiting for this all night. You’ve been driving me mad, Tooru.” 

Hajime bit down on the cord of muscle at the back of Tooru’s neck and Tooru hissed, letting his head fall to the side to give him more access. He reached a hand back to tug on the short dark hair by his cheek, and was gratified when Hajime tightened the arms around his waist, pulling him back firmly into the cradle of Hajime’s hips. 

When he began to grind his ass back suggestively against the half-hardness he felt there, he was spun around and pulled into a hungry kiss. Kissing Hajime had always been one of his favourite things to do since the first time he’d been allowed to indulge, but now, with the promise of something to follow, it felt intoxicating. His lips were soft against Tooru’s, though there was the suggestion of a scrape of stubble now, and as he tangled his finger’s in Tooru’s hair and tugged gently, Tooru let him take control of the kiss.

His tongue brushed against Tooru’s bottom lip, a greeting and an inquiry, and Tooru opened his mouth wider in invitation. The first swipe of his tongue inside Tooru’s mouth, over his own tongue and against his teeth, made Tooru moan, but the hand in his hair kept him still as Hajime continued to explore. 

Tooru began to lose track of time as he was kissed soundly, and the longer it continued the wetter and dirtier it became until he was biting at Hajime’s bottom lip and sucking obscenely on his tongue as the other man groaned into his mouth. Finally, an accidental brush of their erections as Tooru swayed closer to him seemed to snap Hajime out of his lustful haze, and he broke away with a groan. 

If Tooru thought that he would be given a moment to catch his breath, though, he realised his mistake as Hajime tightened the hand still in his hair and brought his mouth to the skin under Tooru’s ear. Pausing only to brush a kiss against it, he began to suck marks down Tooru’s hairline, causing him to buck in Hajime’s hold. 

“Ah! Hajime—”

“Fuck, I forgot how sensitive your neck was, you sound so pretty when I mark you up.” He laughed breathlessly. “And if you think this is a lot then you’re in for a rough night.” 

Tooru whined high and keening as Hajime brought his mouth lower, kissing and sucking a line down his throat towards his collarbone. When he reached it, he paused to bite down  _ hard _ , then resumed his work up the other side with a long wet swipe of his tongue all the way up to Tooru’s earlobe. He took the soft skin into his mouth and began to worry it between his teeth as tears of pleasure stung the corners of Tooru’s closed eyes. 

Under the onslaught of sensation, his mouth hung open and ragged pants and snatches of moans spilled out from between his lips. He had his hands clutching at Hajime’s waist, anchoring him where he stood just inside the doorway. Without the support he was sure he’d have long since fallen to his knees: his legs had turned to jelly as soon as Hajime had begun nipping at the skin he’d already laved over with his clever tongue. 

Actually, knees didn’t sound like such a bad idea, with how Hajime’s cock felt brushing up against him insistently through his pants. He bet it’d feel a million times better with nothing in the way.

“Haji— to the bed, come on, I want you in my mouth.” 

Hajime groaned in response.

As much as he’d have liked to sink to his knees and take Hajime onto his tongue then and there, Tooru didn’t want to look as desperate as he felt and so he led Hajime further into the room. Hajime moved to capture his lips again when they were stood by the bed, eyes hooded and hazy, but Tooru put a hand up to stop him.

“First, strip. I want to see what you’ve been hiding from me.” 

Hajime smirked at the command and took a step back, toeing out of his shoes and stripping off his shirt in a quick movement. Then he slipped his thumbs into his waistband and began to slowly push his pants and underwear down his legs in one motion. As more and more of him was uncovered, the smirk slipped off Tooru’s face and he felt a flush creep down his chest.

Hajime was long and thick, thicker than Tooru himself, cock hanging flushed and heavy between his solid thighs. The base was crowned with a patch of dark curls, and along the length of him veins stood out against the dark skin. He chuckled, low and amused, at the scrutiny and brought his hand up, giving himself a few lazy pumps. As a bead of precum glistened at the tip, Tooru’s mouth began to water. 

“Your turn,” Hajime said, stepping out of the pool of clothes at his feet to approach Tooru. For a moment, Tooru stood dumb, eyes fixed on how Hajime’s cock swayed when he walked, but when he felt warm hands slide under his sweater and shirt, he raised his arms and allowed himself to be stripped bare. After they had thrown his shirt aside, Hajime paused for a moment to remove the glasses from his nose and set them aside gently, a moment of tenderness in the tempest of their urgency. Then his hands were back on Tooru’s bare skin, possessive and all-consuming, and he ducked his head to suck a mark under Tooru’s clavicle. 

When they tried to take Tooru’s jeans off, though, they encountered a problem. 

“What the hell, how tight  _ are _ these things?” Hajime grunted disbelievingly, tugging on one leg as Tooru worked on the other.

“Stop complaining and pull harder, you’re not the one who’s been wearing these all night. It’ll be a miracle if my dick hasn’t fallen off from low circulation, you better appreciate how good I looked for you.”

“Oh I do, but I bet you’ll look even when you’re spread out naked on my— ow! You kicked me!”

“Well you pinched me, so I feel like that was justified. Now put those ridiculously sexy gorilla arms of yours to use and  _ pull harder _ .”

As the jeans finally slid down enough for Tooru to pull his legs free, he staggered backwards out of them, flailing his feet around to free them from the cuffs, and almost fell backwards on the bed in the process. Only grabbing onto Hajime’s shoulders saved him the indignity, and when he was finally free, they stood for a breathless moment in each other’s arms, before devolving into a fit of laughter. 

“Stupid fucking jeans. God, come here, Tooru.”

Then they were kissing again, breathlessness turning desperate as their now-free cocks rubbed together. Tooru slid his hand down Hajime’s chest to cradle his balls, and when he threw his head back to hiss through his teeth Tooru used the opportunity to sink down onto his knees. 

“You should sit down on the bed, I can suck you easily like that.”

“No, I like it like this.” Hajime’s voice was gruff and his pupils blown wide as Tooru gazed up into them, and Tooru simply shrugged before sinking all the way down onto Hajime’s cock in one movement. 

Hajime’s shout was muffled halfway as he stuffed his fist into his mouth, and Tooru smirked around the length in his mouth. He drew back almost all the way to rub the leaking tip wantonly over his lips, then made sure Hajime was still looking at him as he slowly sunk back down. 

God, but it felt amazing to have Hajime on his tongue, filling him up and groaning like Tooru was the best thing he’d ever felt. His dick was too long to fit entirely into Tooru’s mouth, so he brought up a hand to wrap around the base, jerking in time as his lips and tongue worked the head. 

He prided himself on being a quick learner, so within a handful of strokes had learned how Hajime loved it when he ran the tip of his cock against the roof of his mouth, and how he would cry out and fist his hand back into Tooru’s hair when he fluttered his tongue over the veins on the shaft. 

At one point, Tooru’s teeth scraped ever so lightly over the crown by accident, and he quickly withdrew them for fear of hurting Hajime. The groan he got in response, though, prompted him to try it again, and again when Hajime swore and thrust forward involuntarily.

So you like a bit of tooth on your cock, do you? Tooru wanted to ask. I wonder if that means you like this, too.

Making sure his hand was firmly on Hajime’s hip to hold him at bay, he hollowed his cheeks and sucked as hard as he could around the head. Had he not been holding onto Hajime, he was sure the subsequent thrust would have sent his cock straight down his throat, but as it was the hand in his hair tugged so hard that he saw stars. 

“Fuck, Tooru, you look so pretty with your lips wrapped around my dick, makes me wanna mess you up.” 

He hadn’t expected his prosaic best friend to have such a dirty mouth, but it was very much appreciated nonetheless. Tooru groaned around Hajime’s cock and ground his palm against his own erection.

“Can you take me deeper?”

Tooru’s eyebrows rose, but he sucked in a deep breath and closed his eyes before opening his throat and slowly screwing himself onto Hajime’s dick. The loud exhale of, “Fuuuuuuck yeah so good you were made to suck me,” from above him made the discomfort worth it, and he felt his own cock pulse between his legs. 

Up to this point he had felt relatively in control, one in a partnership of people seeking mutual pleasure. When, a moment later, Hajime brought his other hand into play to cup Tooru’s jaw, effectively holding his entire head steady, and looked down at him with lips drawn back over his teeth, Tooru felt that control slipping from his fingers. When he growled, “I’m going to fuck your throat, can you handle that?” Tooru realised he had greatly misjudged the type of lover Hajime was, and the extent to which he loved control. 

It set him on fire.

He nodded as best he could with Hajime still lodged deep inside of him, and the next second was being held inescapably in place as Hajime’s hips snapped forward to drive his cock deep down Tooru’s throat. 

Tooru silently thanked the Gods he had long since lost his gag reflex. Hajime set a steady pace, not too fast that he hurt Tooru, but still bringing Tooru’s lips all the way to the base of his dick with each thrust, with the help of the hands cradling his skull. 

Tooru closed his eyes against the burn of having his throat abused like this, and in a distant way hoped his throat starting slicking Hajime’s length up soon to ease the slide. Then Hajime groaned, low and broken, and began to stroke his thumb back and forth over Tooru’s cheekbone. The sensation of having Hajime all around him and inside of him, holding him like he was precious while coaxing the most depraved sounds from his throat, was like all of his most shameful midnight dreams rolled into one. 

Tooru could feel his throat moving as the sheer girth of the cock inside it forced it outwards, and he almost wished he could take one of Hajime’s hands and wrap it around his neck so he could feel it too. Next time, he promised Hajime silently. 

When the thumb of the hand holding Tooru’s cheek was moved to the corner of his mouth so Hajime could feel the slide of his own cock in and out, Tooru rewarded the obscene gesture by humming low and deep. Hajime cursed. 

“You look even better like this, your throat was made to be fucked. God how are you real, Tooru, you’re so perfect.” He kept up the steady grind of his hips until Tooru’s throat was convulsing around him and his cheeks began to flush deep red from lack of oxygen, then pulled back to thrust shallowly across his tongue as he waited for Tooru to gasp in several deep breaths. 

“Are you okay, am I hurting you? Do you need me to stop?” 

“No, don’t stop,” Tooru pleaded, voice husky and fucked out. His lips remained connected to Hajime’s dick by several strands of saliva and his chin was a mess of spit and precum. And yet he felt like he was burning up under the intensity of Hajime’s pleasure, loving the sounds his mouth was forcing from him, and he couldn't have borne stopping now, despite the mess they were making of him —or perhaps because of it. Even the feeling of having his airflow deliberately cut off by Hajime’s thickness was driving him crazy, and he wondered how it would feel to be choked by those strong hands.

His cock had begun throbbing with every beat of his heart as blood returned to his head, and he took the opportunity of rubbing Hajime’s cockhead against the slick inside of his cheek to take a final steadying breath. Then, grabbing Hajime’s hips, he pulled himself forwards on his own until he was flush with Hajime’s pubic bone once more, and, tears streaming down his cheeks, slid out his tongue to lave at Hajime’s balls.

“Fuck, Tooru!” From one moment to the next he was yanked backwards, coughing and nearly retching at the sudden withdrawal. 

“Wh-wha—” Had he done something wrong? Did Hajime not like it how he did it?

“Sorry, Tooru,” Hajime murmured, suddenly crouching in front of his and rubbing his thumb across Tooru’s saliva-coated bottom lip; “you feel way too good. If you keep going like that then I’m going to come straight down your throat. Come on, come up.”

Hajime helped him to his feet and kissed him, deep and filthy, before pushing him backwards onto the bed. He landed on his back with an audible  _ oof _ , but sat back up quickly and reached out a hand to wrap around Hajime’s still-wet dick. His hand was smacked away before he could get more than a few pumps in though, and he lifted a questioning gaze to find Hajime staring down at him, jaw muscles flexing. 

“Lie back and spread your legs,” he ordered, and Tooru bit his lip as fire pooled low in his belly at the tone. He moved to do as he was told, a rare enough occurrence for him that he saw Hajime quirk an eyebrow and smirk. Sending a haughty glare back in answer as he wiped a hand over his mouth, Tooru finished pushing himself up the bed and lay back, letting his legs fall open in the most lewd way possible and wrapping his hand around his own length. He was rewarded by how Hajime’s cock jumped and his face went slack, eyes hooded and pupils blown wide.

“Fuck that’s hot,” he said as he stepped forward and began crawling up the bed on his hands and knees. Tooru could have purred under the praise and the look of hunger Hajime had him pinned with, and he reached out his free hand to welcome Hajime back into his embrace for another kiss. His lover stopped with his hands just over Tooru’s hips, though, and sat back on his haunches with a smirk. 

“You’re going to have to open them wider than that.” 

Then he was sliding one hand under Tooru’s tailbone and the other over his hip and bending his own body forwards, down towards Tooru’s cock only he didn’t stop there, he kept going even further down towards—

“Whaa—” The first swipe of Hajime’s tongue over his entrance made his hips jerk in Hajime’s grip. 

He flung his hands out to grip at the sheets above his head. “Wait, what are you—”

“What do you think I’m doing? I thought it was pretty self-explanatory.” 

Tooru opened his mouth to snark back that if Hajime had the time to run his mouth maybe he should find something more productive to do with it, but Hajime chose that moment to forestall him. He pushed his tongue as deep as he could into Tooru, who yelped and bucked against the arm now holding his hips down to the bed.

“Fuck! Do that again.” 

“So bossy,” Hajime grumbled, but complied and began in earnest to lick at the most intimate part of Tooru’s body with obvious enjoyment. As his movements became more rhythmic— a lap here, a thrust there— he began to let out soft moans against Tooru’s skin, hand coming up to better angle Tooru.

The sensation was— alien. Not unwelcome, but also very different from anything Tooru had ever felt, and he’d thought he’d felt everything. He was surprised by how wet he was becoming as his cock dripped precum onto his stomach and made a mess of the hand still pinning him down. He couldn't stop his stomach muscles from contracting every time Hajime circled him either, and his breathing was getting increasingly laboured.

So, it was safe to say that his body was very much enjoying the feeling of being eaten out, but he couldn’t help but think that surely this couldn’t be something that Hajime was enjoying. He couldn’t stop the self-conscious flush spreading down his chest even as little hitched sounds started spilling from his slack mouth. 

The low moan that met his ears when his hips began involuntary to press back against Hajime’s mouth and the momentary pause in his ministrations to suck a hickey into Tooru’s inner thigh told another story, though.

The longer Hajime continued, the more lost Tooru became in the sensation, closing his eyes and moaning in earnest; and after not very many more moments he became shameless, laid out on the bed with his head thrown back wantonly as Hajime fucked him open with his tongue.

“‘S it feel good, Tooru? You like that?” 

Tooru groaned low and depraved, unsure how he could be expected to respond when he wasn’t even sure his mouth was connected to his brain anymore. Hajime seemed to understand what he meant all the same, because he swore softly. 

“Yeah, fuck, knew you’d love having your ass eaten.” Did he love it? It was true that his synapses short circuited every time Hajime swiped the flat of his tongue over Tooru’s entrance, and when he pushed it inside Tooru thought he could see the face of God, so he supposed he really must. He slipped his hand between his own legs to tangle in Hajime’s hair, trying to tell him without words what he was doing to him.

When Hajime slid in a long finger beside his tongue, Tooru almost jackknifed off the bed. “Yeah, like that, in me,” he breathed nonsensically as Hajime began to thrust his finger in and out, lapping his tongue over the skin where their bodies joined. The slide was eased by a generous coating of Hajime’s saliva so there wasn’t even the familiar burn of the stretch to distract Tooru from the pleasure of finally having Hajime inside him this way too, and the breathy moans falling from his lips began to get louder and louder. 

Then Hajime crooked his finger and, a second later, brought his other hand from Tooru’s hip to his perineum and  _ pressed _ , and the dual stimulation against his prostate made Tooru wail. 

“Aa _ aah _ Haji—” Hajime did it again and Tooru felt tears gather on his lashes as he squeezed his eyes shut. Soon Hajime had set up a rhythm, curl lick press, curl lick  _ press _ , and a sob ripped free of Tooru’s chest. He couldn't think, his cock was drooling so much he had trails of precum leaking down his shaft, and Hajime wasn’t giving him an ounce of rest between fucking his fingers and his tongue into him and rubbing his perineum with the thumb of the other hand.

He’d never been so turned on in his whole life, and he couldn’t even find the sounds around his breathless cries and wails to form Hajime’s name. 

“Haji—  _ ah _ Hajime ca-careful I’m gonna—” Hajime pulled back, wiping his mouth on his shoulder without taking his hands away from their wicked work.

“Do you have stuff?” His voice was rough and deep, fucked out as if he were the one being strung out and trying desperately not to come.

“H-huh?”

“Stuff, like, condoms and lube? Because I don’t.” 

“Oh!” How Hajime expected him to be able to think let alone respond when he was riding the knife edge of his own orgasm was beyond him, but he desperately cast his mind back to where he’d put his supplies when he’d been packing up. 

“Th-they’re in my, in my backpack.” Which was in the car, which was still parked by the arena 15 minutes’ walk away. “Fuck!”

At that, Hajime slowed his pace and frowned, seemingly considering their options. 

“We, we could use the hotel body lotion?” Tooru panted.

“Shut up idiot, I’m not using that on you, I told you I didn’t want to hurt you. Plus, we still wouldn’t have any condoms. Let me think.” 

Tooru knew better than to suggest they do it raw; ever since he’d first let slip that sometimes he forgot to wrap up, Hajime had been on his case about the dangers unsafe sex posed to someone like Tooru. 

“Okay, okay I have an idea. Get on your knees and put your hands on the headboard.” Tooru scrambled to obey, keen to do anything that would alleviate the ache in his desperately hard cock. “Don’t touch yourself,” Hajime commanded a second later, seemingly reading his mind.

There was nothing inherently erotic about the position Tooru found himself in, his ass not even pushed far enough back to feel like he was presenting himself. The feeling of being constrained by Hajime’s will, though, combined with the unmistakable click of a cap opening and the sound of a gel being poured into Hajime’s hand made him whine and push his hips back.

“Fuck, you’re so needy,” Hajime breathed in wonderment. Tooru felt that was hardly his fault given that Hajime had spent the last however long working him up into a babbling mess, but when he heard the tell-tale squishing sounds of Hajime slicking up his length with whatever was in his hand he shut his mouth. 

“I thought you didn’t have lube?” Tooru questioned, trying to strain over his shoulder to catch a glimpse, and receiving a hard smack on his left ass cheek for his trouble. 

“This isn’t lube, it’s mentholated sports massage gel,” Hajime grunted. “So I’m definitely not putting this in you either, but it should be okay for what I have in mind.” 

“What’s that?” he asked, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice, but Hajime only laughed breathlessly and hushed him.

“Wait,” Tooru spoke again after a beat, “if it’s mentholated doesn’t that mean it’s a bit like deep heat? Isn’t your dick burning?” 

“Mhmm.” 

Tooru almost whipped around, but Hajime kept him in place with a firm hand on his waist.

“But doesn’t that hurt?”

“Nah,” he said tightly, breaths coming harder and shorter now on the back of Tooru’s neck, “feels good. Real fucking good.” 

Tooru’s mouth fell open in surprise and then desire as a wave of heat hit him at the debauched sound of Hajime’s voice.

He’d heard of mentholated lubes that supposedly heightened every sensation of course, but hadn’t ever tried them on (or in) himself. Although it hadn’t been designed for this, he supposed distantly the massage gel worked the same, although he trusted Hajime’s judgement in not putting it inside of him. He didn’t much fancy their first time together being marred by cataclysmic and traumatic miscalculation. 

That of course begged the question of what Hajime was going to do with him if he wasn’t going to fuck him. Speaking of begging—

“Hajime,  _ please _ , I’m going crazy here I need you to get out of that tiny head of yours and  _ do something  _ to me— ah!”

Hajime had used his own bent legs to kick Tooru’s thighs together until they were touching and now slid a slick hand between them to lubricate a path along his perineum to where his balls hung tight against his body. 

“Wh-what are you doing?” 

“Yeah, okay this one is a little less self-explanatory,” Hajime grunted. “Keep your legs tight together, I’m going to fuck you like this.” Then he poured some more gel unceremoniously onto first his own cock, then Tooru’s, ignoring the hiss the cold liquid engendered. 

He moved forwards until his knees bracketed Tooru’s, heaving chest pressed against Tooru’s back in a hot press of skin-on-skin. Then, with one hand braced against Tooru’s belly and the other coming around to take Tooru’s cock into its tight grip, Hajime lined up his cock with Tooru’s ass and thrust forward.

The slide along his perineum was eased by the generous coating of gel Hajime had made sure to use, and as the head of the cock between his legs rubbed deliciously against the back of his balls, Tooru understood what Hajime was doing. He clenched his thighs closer together, narrowing the tunnel between them Hajime was using to get off, and in response Hajime groaned and began to pump Tooru’s cock faster. 

“Fuck,” Tooru said breathlessly, getting worked up all over again by the feeling of Hajime surrounding him; “your dick reaches all the way to my balls, I think I’m going to die when you finally decide to fuck me for real.”

“Better write your will, then, because I’m going to fuck you as soon as I can get my hands on a halfway decent lube.”

“Tell me,” Tooru implored.

Hajime groaned in his ear and continued his hard thrusts between Tooru’s thighs. “I’m going to start with fucking you open on my fingers. You’d be so greedy for me you’d let me work you up to four, wouldn’t you? Then I bet if I asked  _ real _ nice that pretty little ass of yours could take the fifth as well.”

Tooru keened at his words, throwing his head back onto Hajime’s shoulder. 

The gel has begun to heat and Tooru understood what Hajime had meant; the deep burn of the menthol made his flushed skin impossibly more sensitive, every touch setting him on fire. Hajime’s hand on him felt almost too perfect, slick and tight and slowly taking away his sanity, but the hot length of steel between his legs that was Hajime’s cock was what made it hard to draw breath.

“Then I’m going to give you my dick,” Hajime continued in a voice raw and ripped open from pleasure, “but you’re going to have to work yourself onto it, I want to see how much you want me.”

“So much, Hajime,” Tooru sobbed, “more than anything.” 

“Fuck, you have no idea what you do to me, Tooru. You drive me crazy, all I want to do is split you open on my dick where you belong, so happy you came back to me, gonna make you scream my name.”

The constant sensation everywhere on him had Tooru gasping, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes as he bordered on overstimulation. He reached behind him to rub Hajime’s balls on the outstrokes, wanting to give back some of the mind blowing pleasure he was being given, but Hajime growled warningly in his ear.

“Hands on the headboard, Tooru.” 

“I-I just want to make you feel good too.”

“You already are, I just want to take care of you this time; I want you to just feel it, think you can do that?” 

Tooru nodded mutely against Hajime’s shoulder, trying to focus on every individual sensation he was feeling, on Hajime’s hand pumping his erection, his cock sliding between his thighs and his lips kissing up his throat, rather than the whole overwhelming panoply. He was so close he thought he’d die if he didn’t come soon, but he tried to hold it together a little longer.

When Hajime bit down hard on the exposed column of his throat, though, that sensitive throat that made him mewl when it was so much as nibbled on softly, his mind whited out.

He thought he might have yelled as he came, if he’d had enough air left in his lungs for something so monumental, but when he came back to himself he was slumped forward bodily over the headboard, panting for breath. His muscles shook, skin buzzing as if with some kind of electric charge, and his dick, still burning with the remnants of menthol, was joined to the sheet below it by a thin string of cum. 

Hajime had stroked him through his orgasm but stopped when he whimpered from the oversensitivity, instead planting both hands on Tooru’s hips. He gave Tooru a moment to catch his breath, kissing at the juncture of his throat, before he once again brought his mouth to Tooru’s ear. “You looked so good Tooru, so fucking hot. But now it’s my turn.”

Tooru cried out as Hajime’s thrusts resumed, harder and faster than before, and he was pulled bodily against Hajime like he weighed nothing at all as the other man used his body to seek his own release. 

“You’re so perfect, Tooru, so perfect for me you feel so good, wanna make you mine, wanna fill you up, fuck I— ah!” Then he was coming, hot and hard between Tooru’s thighs, almost doubling them both over with the intensity of it as it tore through him. 

Once he was completely spent, Hajime collapsed sideways onto the bed, eyes half closed and chest heaving. Tooru followed a little more carefully, avoiding the wet patches they’d left throughout the night and attempting to stop the mess between his own thighs from spreading everywhere. He lay beside Hajime just short of touching, the first to recover but unwilling to be the first to speak. 

After a long pause, Hajime half-raised his head to look across at Tooru. “Does your dick suddenly feel really cold like it’s been dipped in mint toothpaste or is it just mine?” 

They stared at each other for a second, both considering the states of their respective genitalia, before dissolving into exhausted laughter. 

“What are you doing all the way over there,” Hajime murmured and rolled onto his side so he could gaze down at Tooru, propping his head up on his fist. “Hi,” he said softly, brushing Tooru’s fringe away from his eyes.

“Hi,” Tooru answered, almost shyly though it felt bizarre to suddenly be shy in front of his best friend. 

He leaned up to capture his lips in a gentle kiss, sighing when the hand in his hair moved down to stroke along his throat.

“You were so good,” Hajime murmured against his lips. 

Tooru hummed and hooked his arm around to the back of Hajime’s neck to pull him closer. “You too,” he breathed.

It felt so normal, so natural for them to be together like this that Tooru couldn’t believe he’d ever been unsure. When they broke the kiss, Hajime bent down to press a butterfly kiss to his nose, then his cheeks, then his forehead.

“By the way,” Tooru murmured, scrunching his nose under the onslaught, “you’re kind of filthy Hajime, I didn’t know you could be like that.” 

Hajime flushed darkly and ducked his head in mortification. “Yeah, well,” he grumbled, “I told you you drive me crazy, it’s not my fault you looked like you needed a good fucking. Besides, I didn’t see you complaining.” Tooru could still see the tips of his ears burning from where he was hiding in his folded arms. 

“Oh I very much wasn’t complaining, I was just a little surprised is all.”

Hajime huffed and lifted his head again, rolling his eyes despite the fact that the flush made him look substantially less in control of himself than he’d have no doubt liked. “You know I like sex too, Tooru. I just never thought once we got together that I’d have to do it with someone who wasn’t you again.” 

Tooru winced, the small smile he’d worn while teasing Hajime falling from his lips. He turned his face away to look at the hideous lamp by the bedside in an effort to hide the sudden regret and guilt in his eyes for his part in the breakup. What was more, for all that it was incredible to have Hajime here in front of him again looking at him as if he’d hung the stars, they hadn’t given each other any assurances that they would patch up what was broken between them beyond agreeing that they were far worse off without each other. 

“Hey, no, I didn’t mean it like that, don’t take it like that.” Hajime was back at his side in an instant, fingertips stroking his cheek trying to coax him to look back up.

“No, I know you didn’t, it’s fine. I guess I’m just still so used to missing you, it’ll take a bit for me to get used to having you back. So you’ll just need to be a little patient with my poor heart, if it’s still what you want.” He let the end of his sentence hang, giving Hajime the chance to pour reassurances over him.

Hajime hummed and dropped his eyes to where his hand had begun to play with Tooru’s fingers lying idly on his chest. “Well didn’t you say earlier that your heart already belonged to me? So doesn’t that make it my poor heart?” 

Tooru extricated his fingers and reached up to cup Hajime’s jaw in his palm, fingertips brushing the short hairs on the back of his neck. He often wished that he had the ability to read minds so that he would never have to guess at what someone was thinking, and he used to think that the connection he shared with Hajime was as close as one person could get to knowing another person’s thoughts. As he gazed up into Hajime’s dark eyes now, though, he couldn’t hear a word.

“But don’t you wonder how many times we could have done this if we’d gotten our act together sooner?” he goaded. 

“Yeah, but if you use logic like that then I wonder about the years we spent not knowing that volleyball existed. If you let yourself think that way then maybe if we’d been introduced to it at two instead of seven we would have beaten Ushijima and gone to Nationals.” 

Tooru widened his eyes to glare in disbelief at his lover. “Did you seriously just use that man’s name while lying naked in bed with me?” 

Hajime snorted and rolled his eyes again, clearly very intimidated by Tooru’s wrath. “You’re such a drama queen. He’s actually not a bad guy anyway, once you get to know him a bit. He’s just got the personality of a lobster and the social skills of a sea cucumber. Although not tonight, apparently — maybe you just bring out the best in him.”

“Wash your mouth out with soap!” 

Hajime laughed again, loud and open, and rolled away from him to stand up, holding out a hand to help Tooru up.

“Speaking of, I think it’s about time we shower, I feel like sin incarnate.” 

Tooru accepted the hand but felt a bubble of panic rise in his throat as he scrambled to think of a way to ask Hajime to promise him something that may not even be in his power to promise. 

“What, are you over the sight of my naked body already? Wasn’t that a bit quick to get tired of me?”

“Yeah, that’s it. It’s not because the combination of deep heat and drying cum is making me want to itch my skin off, it must be about you.”

Tooru frowned and looked down at their joined hands, mouth turning down at the corners.

“Tooru—” When he looked up, Hajime was staring back at him with a look of part exasperation, part understanding. He stepped closer to Tooru, right up into his space until the length of their bodies were pressed together and Hajime could brush his lips over Tooru’s softly. 

“I could never be sick of you and I definitely will never get over the vision that is you naked on my bed. I don’t know why you’re stressing but you have absolutely no need: I’m not going anywhere.” 

“You’re not?” Tooru’s voice was smaller than he’d intended and he cleared his throat to try again. “You’re sure?”

Hajime swept his lips over Tooru’s cheek, taking his hands and swaying them slightly where they stood so it felt like they were slow-dancing.

“How many people do you know who get two chances at real love? Plus you did drive almost 3000 kilometres to let me yell at you, so somehow somewhere along the way it seems that I made you fall in love with me as hard as I did you. So for my part, yes I’m sure.” Tooru’s heart soared and he felt the inevitable pool of tears well in his eyes. 

“I was sure the day I figured out why I would get so mad to see you with other people who weren’t me,” Hajime continued; “and the day you first let me kiss you, in your parent’s backyard after we’d spent all day digging them that rose garden. And I was still sure when you told me you wanted to wait before we did anything because you’d never gotten to wait for it before and this time it actually meant something.” 

Tooru felt the first tear slip from his lashes and Hajime’s hand came up immediately to dash it off his cheek. “I would have waited years if you’d asked me to, as long as you promised me one day I’d be yours and you’d be mine in every way we could manage. I love you, Tooru; whatever else happens that will never change. I just...” 

The tears were falling faster now and Tooru hiccuped on a sob, trying to get his breathing back under control. “Y-you just?” Hajime stood back for a moment gazing into his face —his ugly crying face, red-nosed and blotchy skinned, thanks parents for that genetic lemon —then his face softened and he drew Tooru back into his arms. “Never mind. You’re so cute when you cry.” 

“I thought you said I looked awful,” he sniffed petulantly.

“Yeah, but somehow at the same time awful cute. You’re lucky —I don’t know anyone else on the planet who’d look at this mess and think ‘that’s  _ my _ mess’.” 

Tooru choked on a laugh and buried his face in Hajime’s neck. “It’s like I’ve been saying all along, maybe my true soulmate doesn’t even live on this planet.”

He heard Hajime whisper a quiet “wow” above him but kept talking.

“My teammate in Porto, Raul, always teased me that I cried after sex. How mortifying that he was right.” 

At his words he felt Hajime’s arms stiffen around him for a moment, and his jaw muscles contracted as he clenched his teeth. Tooru pulled back to look down at his face, but Hajime turned his face away and let out a chuckle which would only have sounded forced to someone who had known him all his life. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. He seems like a funny guy.” 

Tooru huffed in annoyance and dug his fingers into his ribs.

“Ouch! Tooru—”

“Hajime.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, each trying to hold their ground, then Hajime sighed and turned his eyes downwards at their intertwined hands. 

“I’m glad that you had someone to take care of you, I am, and I’m happy you weren’t alone. But is it so wrong for me to be jealous that he got to be close to you while I was miserable halfway around the world?” 

Tooru blinked. “You’re jealous?” Hajime shrugged. “Of Raul?” Hajime shrugged again, frowning self-consciously. “Why?”

“Come on, Tooru, I’m not an idiot. I saw the picture of you two after your win, I know what it looks like when you’re comfortable touching someone’s body and I know what it means. It’s none of my business, but you did ask.” 

“Oh! No, that is so not what that is, Raul is like my brother.” He saw Hajime raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Plus he’s straight as uncooked spaghetti. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who loves women as much as him, it’s almost an obsession. There is nothing for you to be jealous of.” 

“Oh. Okay.”

“Okay?” 

Hajime nodded, lips quirking in an uneven smile, and raised his face to steal a kiss. 

“Now, can I tempt you into the shower with my naked body or will I have to drag you?” 

After they had washed away all traces of sweat and sex from their skin, trading lazy kisses under the spray, they stripped the bed of the top sheets and lay together under the comforter. The lights remained unlit, so the room was only illuminated by the glow of streetlamps and the headlights of the occasional passing car. They huddled closer as the clock on the bedside table ticked later and the cars became less frequent, murmured conversations interspersed with batches of sweet kisses.

Hajime told Tooru about life as a V-League player, about being recognised on the street and about the intense gratification of once having beaten Ushiwaka’s team in a broadcast show match for charity. In turn, Tooru told Hajime about the tournament he’d won, about living in Porto with all the joys and difficulties of learning a new culture, and finally about the last couple of weeks travelling around Europe with Shouyou. 

They laughed at each other’s more ridiculous exploits, cheered the successes and commiserated with the failures, and all the while their familiar dynamic came back to them so naturally they could almost forget the hurt of being apart. Hajime had perfected the art of teasing Tooru to the point that he could rile him up then smooth his ruffled feathers all within the space of a ten-second cycle, and he used it against him mercilessly. 

At one point, Tooru’s driving became the butt of Hajime’s mockery, who claimed he found it impossible to believe that Tooru had only left Porto a fortnight ago.

“You’re a very safe driver, Tooru, I’ll give you that.” Tooru preened and tossed his head exaggeratedly. “Of course, that means you drive slower than sin, so there is a trade off. Plus you suck at directions.”

“Hey! What’s that mean?”

“It means you shouldn’t be allowed within 10 meters of a car because you’re a hazard. You either drive so slow you put all of their drivers to sleep or you forget you need to be in the exit lane in order to get off a highway and you try merge across at the last minute.” 

Tooru squawked in indignation.

“Oh come on, you drive like an old lady, you can’t seriously be telling me you managed to drive 3000 kilometres in less than a month and didn’t get lost once.”

“That is so untrue it’s slanderous.”

Hajime hummed low in his throat. “Slander? That’s a serious accusation, what kind of punishment do slanderers get, your honour?”

“They get ignored,” Tooru huffed, flipping over in Hajime’s arms to show him his back. “And besides,” he shot back over his shoulder, “I was almost in a head-on collision with a truck, so that’s not very boring, is it?”

“Wait, what?” Hajime choked, but Tooru settled back onto his side, set on teaching Hajime a lesson. 

“Tooru, what did you mean?” 

Again, Tooru kept his back turned and ignored his words, wrapping his arms around himself and tucking his head more firmly into the pillow. 

“Come on, stop playing, I want you to tell me about the accident you were almost in. Tooru, stop ignoring me!” 

Serves you right, Tooru wanted to say, for maligning my driving. He’d been working on it since arriving in Portugal so he didn’t think it was fair to be judged by the outdated standards of his previous self.

“Hey, please stop ignoring me, don’t turn your back. Why won’t you listen to me?” He reached out a hand and shook Tooru’s side roughly, trying to make him turn back forcefully. “Tooru, don’t turn your back on me! Why won’t you turn around, why do you never turn around?”

At that Tooru’s eyes widened and he spun back around to face the other man. He had just been playing, not even really bothered by the not-entirely-unjust accusations that had been levelled at him. One look at Hajime’s face, though, told him this was no longer a joke. 

He looked shattered, his expression broken and hurting and his brow creased as he gazed sightlessly down at his hands. 

“Hajime?” Tooru shuffled over to him quickly, bringing their foreheads together so he could try to catch his eye.

“Why didn’t you look back?”

“What? When?”

Hajime swallowed hard and frowned harder, but rather than looking more intimidating Tooru could tell he was trying to hold himself together.

“At the airport. I keep telling myself it’s stupid and it’s not important and that I shouldn’t care anymore. But you never turned around.” He scrubbed his hand roughly over his eyes, almost too roughly, and Tooru grabbed his wrist and pulled it back down gently. 

“Even after that huge fight we had, I wanted to see you off at the airport with your parents because I couldn’t bear to have you think that I hated you. Also because I needed to see you one last time before you left me, so I don’t know if that makes me a masochist or a damn fool. I kept telling myself that you would, and begging you to hear what I was thinking, but you never looked back after we said goodbye, not once the whole time you were walking to the gate. Didn’t you want to see if I was still there, or see me at all? Was I really that easy to leave? I couldn’t take my eyes off you, Tooru, why didn’t you turn around?”

“Oh Hajime...” Tooru’s heart broke for him as he squeezed his eyes shut against the raw emotion in his voice, and he brought his other hand up to cup both of Hajime’s cheeks. He gazed at Hajime, unable to make him meet his eyes, but trying to convey the sincerity of his words through his voice and the hands holding Hajime’s face.

“The reason I didn’t look back was because I’d never have been able to leave you if I did. That, and I couldn’t bear for you to see me cry. That last hug you gave me before I left for the gate was simultaneously the worst and the best thing I’d ever felt, but you had told me you didn’t want a relationship with me anymore so I had to leave you. But please believe me when I tell you it was like leaving half of my heart behind.” 

Hajime sniffed, muscles shaking as he held himself rigid in Tooru’s arms and fought against his tears. Finally, he relaxed a little and, letting out a shaky sigh, said, “I get it. You were taking the other half of mine away with you, after all.”

Tooru held him for a while longer, smoothing his hands up and down over his bare back and murmuring nonsense into his hair. Soon he began to press kisses into his tanned skin to accompany the words, and when Hajime finally raised his face to accept Tooru’s kisses he was able to give them back with as much ardour. 

“By the way, you’re going to tell me about that truck,” Hajime murmured in between kisses.

“Yeah, sorry, I shouldn’t have just dropped that on you. I’ll tell you tomorrow if you buy me breakfast.”

“Always the sponger.” 

Once they became too tired to do more than share sweet, dry brushes of lips, they closed their eyes, refusing unanimously to untangle their bodies to go to sleep. They had many things to talk about still, Tooru knew, and many wounds to heal, but that could wait for the following morning and all other mornings to come. Just before they drifted off, Tooru reached up to where his phone lay on the bedside table and sent Shouyou a quick message. 

“What did you send him?” Hajime murmured, a strip of iris visible beneath his hooded eyelids.

“Just a song.”

Hajime hummed in inquiry. 

“Don’t worry about it. Go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.” 

When, in the morning, Tooru checked his phone again, he’d see that Shouyou had responded to his message — _ He Loves Me  _ by Lianne La Havas —with a string of red hearts. 


	9. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to everyone who’s stuck with this fic with me and to all the readers coming! I choose to believe Hinata and Oikawa have personalised ringtones for one another by this point, however that would sound.

Early the following morning, long before the teams were required to assemble at the arena for their warmups, someone rapped clear and firm at their door. Hajime had just come out of the bathroom and stooped to pick up a pair of track pants to tug hurriedly onto his bare legs before pulling it open. 

“Hey man, how’d you go last night? Was the bar any fun after we left?” 

Tooru craned his neck to see who it was, but when he heard Sawamura’s quiet laugh he settled back against the pillows.

“We made do, although we were happy to sacrifice you to a good cause. I actually came by to grab some clothes if I could, I didn’t get the chance to before I went to Suga’s room last night.” 

“Oh shit, sorry I didn’t even think of that, come in.” He held the door open and Sawamura stepped in behind him. 

“It’s no problem, Suga lent me some of his clothes to sleep in.”

“I guess that means I should hurry up and get down to the car,” Tooru chimed in from his place on the bed, “I imagine Shouyou is in the same position.” 

Sawamura glanced his way, before quickly lowering his eyes and chuckling awkwardly. Tooru was sitting upright in Hajime’s bed, naked save for the covers pulled low around his waist and eating a pot of yoghurt from the bar fridge in the corner. His hair, he imagined, was the happy lovechild of bedhead and sex hair, and he could only imagine how debauched he looked. 

“He actually wanted to come up with me and see you this morning but I managed to convince him to wait until you came down of your own accord.” 

“Scared you’d find us  _ in flagrante _ ?” Tooru teased while Hajime groaned despairingly in the background, but Sawamura only smiled. 

“I thought it wise to give you space,” he demurred tactfully. “That’s why I knocked extra loud.” 

Tooru laughed delightedly and sat forward as Sawamura moved to grab his bags from the foot of his bed. 

“You guys only have the one game today, right?” Sawamura and Hajime nodded in unison. “What happens next?”

“The rest of the European teams will move on to Russia to play some of the Russian League teams,” Sawamura responded, “along with any Japanese V-League teams who top their pool.”

“Which is looking at this point like it won’t be us or Kageyama’s team,” Hajime added. 

Tooru hummed, picking at the label of the pot in his hands. “And the rest of you are going back to Japan?”

“Yeah, well, we’re in between seasons at the moment so there’s not much point hanging around if we won’t get to play much. May as well head back home and get a headstart start on preseason training.”

Sawamura straightened up with a bag in each hand. “Right, I’ve got everything so I’ll leave you to it.” He nodded at Tooru and smiled at Hajime, nudging him with his shoulder on the way past. “I guess I’ll see you at the game.” 

After he had closed the door behind him, Tooru threw the blanket back and stepped out to stand before Hajime, pulling him into a kiss. 

“Mmm I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this sight,” Hajime hummed as he drew back, heavy gaze sliding down the length of Tooru’s body like hands on his skin. 

“Well just in case you do, maybe I should cover it up when I’m in front of you and keep it for special occasions only.” 

Hajime laughed, but he’d busied himself with kissing up the length of Tooru’s throat and running his hands up and down his sides, pausing to grab onto his ass and squeeze, and so didn’t bother responding. 

“Hey,” Tooru said some long moments later, voice breathy and lips wet and swollen, “about your flight back to Tokyo; how flexible do you think your timetable is?”

xxx

After sending Hajime off to the arena for the team’s pre-game warmup, coffee in hand and wearing Hajime’s most comfortable track pants and Seijoh hoodie, Tooru jogged down the street to where he could see Shouyou waiting for him by the car. As he drew nearer, Shouyou pushed himself away from the hood and came forward to meet him, tucking himself under Tooru’s arm as he drew him in for a hug. 

“Good morning, you look like you slept well,” Shouyou said, smiling cheekily up at him. 

“You know I really did. I guess Switzerland agrees with me.” Tooru fished the key fob out of his pocket and they both turned to pull their bags out of the boot. “How about you? Where did you end up sleeping?” 

“In Kageyama’s room, I swapped with Ushiwaka and he ended up rooming with a couple of the other heavy hitters because Bokuto swapped out to be with Akaashi. I felt really bad to kick him out but he said it was okay and since Kageyama and me went to bed later than all of them he said it was best that way so Kageyama didn’t have to disturb his rest and he could be fully replenished tomorrow. Like he actually said ‘fully replenished’, he’s so cool.”

“Yeah, that sounds like something he would say,” Tooru muttered sourly. 

“Also what happened to your jeans? You definitely didn’t have those yesterday.” He nodded at Hajime’s sweats.

“Oh there was no way in hell I was putting my jeans back on after the drama they caused me getting them off last night. They’re my show jeans anyway, they worked their magic last night so I wouldn’t have to wear them again today, or ever, hopefully.” 

Shouyou barked out a laugh, startling a posse of pigeons near the arena which scattered and took flight in a whirlwind of feathers and seed. He winced. “Oh whoops.” 

“So, speaking of last night,” he continued as they turned to walk back to the hotel together, drawing out the first syllable like a grade schooler; “I was kinda beyond excited to see your message even though I guess I assumed your phone would be off, does this mean our adventure was a success?” He turned his dimples towards Tooru, that damn knowing glint peeking out of his eyes.

For once, though, Tooru didn’t care to snort or snark. He just turned his face downwards and let a small, genuine smile spread slowly over his face until he was smiling at his shoes. From the corner of his eye he caught Shouyou doing a little happy dance but he didn’t acknowledge it with a reaction. 

“I’m kinda surprised to see you walking so well this morning, though.”

At that, Tooru did react. He whipped his head up to look at Shouyou, eyebrows hiking up his forehead in shock. “My, how forward of you. What, pray tell, would you know about that?” 

Shouyou’s face became immediately and concerningly red. “Ahh I couldn’t pull it off, I’m sorry! It’s something I heard Daichi say to Suga, he said knowing Iwaizumi he’d be surprised if you could walk in the morning and I thought it’d be suave if I slipped in an adult joke but I couldn’t do it, it’s like thinking about sex between my parents it’s too weird!” 

Tooru shook his head as the hotel came in sight up the broad street. “Unbelievable.” 

Just before they mounted the steps, Shouyou put a restraining hand on Tooru’s forearm. 

“Hey…” Tooru stopped with his foot on the first stair and turned back to face him, brows furrowed questioningly. “You won’t do that thing you do when you get close to someone physically and use it as a mask so they don’t realise you’re shutting them out emotionally, right?”

Tooru blinked. 

“You know what I mean,” Shouyou continued imploringly. “That thing where you get naked or make dirty jokes or, probably, you let people touch you and they think it means they’ve gotten close to you but actually it’s just a smokescreen so you don’t have to open up to them. You’re not doing that with Iwaizumi, are you, to avoid talking about what happened before?” 

Tooru stood in front of him speechlessly for a long moment, staring at his guileless face and round, innocent eyes. “You know, you’re going to take over the world someday, if that’s what you want,” he blurted out.

Shouyou’s brow wrinkled. “What?” 

“Nothing.” He huffed a quiet laugh, swiping a hand through his hair. “You don’t need to worry about me, that’s not what’s happening. You’d be proud of me, I’ve actually been using my words. Besides, he’s the only person I’ve never been able to do that to, so he’d kick my ass if I even tried.” 

Shouyou studied his face for a moment. “And you’re happy?” 

Tooru felt that smile tugging at the corners of his lips again. “Yeah, Sho.” He paused before continuing. “Actually, we talked about it and we decided that he’ll drive back to Porto with me to drop off the car and say goodbye to Raul and everyone there. That way we’ll be able to spend his birthday together. As long as his coach is willing to let him take ten days off, that is,” he amended.

“Goodbye?”

“Yeah. I’m going back to Japan for a while, might see if I can play a season in the V-League.” 

Shouyou’s kilowatt smile was blinding, a summer sun breaking from behind storm clouds. “That’s amazing, Tooru! That’s going to be so much fun, you’re going to slay them dead!” He paused. “Will your knee be able to handle the hard court again, though?” 

“Yeah. Ironically enough, I think this trip was the final thing it needed. With all the rest I’ve had it’s almost totally good as new, or as good as it’ll ever be.” 

“This is so exciting, I’m so excited for you!”

“What will you do?”

Shouyou cocked his head to the side and smiled again. “Oh don’t worry about me, I’m not going to head back to Japan yet but I’m not scared of going back anymore when I feel like I’m ready. For the moment, I’m going to do a little more adventuring before I head back for the season in Portugal. Paris, remember?” 

“Ah, Paris, how could I forget.” 

That afternoon, they sat together as they watched the final games of the Japanese teams, sat on the edge of their seats as they cheered like a couple of middle-schoolers. Hajime and Sawamura lost their match while Tobio and Ushiwaka won theirs, much to Tooru’s chagrin.

When he saw Hajime speaking to his coach after the game though, and caught sight of the handshake they shared as the coach shook his head bemusedly at Hajime’s blinding grin, Ushiwaka could have done a strip tease in front of him and he’d still have been the most effervescently happy man on Earth. 

He packed up the car while Hajime was still in the change rooms, waiting with Shouyou as the others slowly assembled at the exit to the arena. Tobio stalked up to them to lean into Shouyou’s space, no doubt picking some dumb fight in a juvenile attempt at flirting, and Sawamura and the silver-haired Sugawara came up after him to gently coax the two apart. 

When finally Hajime emerged and came to throw his gear into the back of the car alongside Tooru’s, pressing a chaste kiss to his temple, Shouyou sobered quickly. As Hajime walked back to shake hands with Sawamura and the others and bid them farewell, he began to sniffle, though he was clearly making an effort to hide it behind his sleeve. 

Tooru sighed when his shoulders began to shake and pulled him into a hug despite his squeak of protest. 

“It’s not like I’m never going to see you again, you big baby. We’ll see each other soon, and you can show me what you’ve learned.”

“I k-know, I’m not sad I’m happy for you, I just—”

“Yeah I know.” He rested his chin on top of Shouyou’s head as his sobs continued. 

“I’m r-really gonna miss you.”

“Me too, kid, but don’t get too sad, okay? And if you do, head to Brazil for a break and I’ll get Raul to look after you.” He began to rub circles into Shouyou’s back. “In fact, if you like it there then you should let him persuade you to stay, he’s looking for a beach second and I think you’d get on like a house on fire. Although between the two of you, I think you might actually be able to set a house on fire, so maybe not.”

Shouyou turned big eyes upwards, lashes still wet with tears. “You really think I could play in Brazil?” 

“Sure, why not? Plus, if you did, we might end up being neighbours. I hear the Argentinian League is a rush, and two Japanese V-League players would be a hell of a catch.” 

Shouyou’s eyes sparkled, his mouth hanging open at the idea, and Tooru laughed. “I told you we’d see each other again, I didn’t say it had to be in Japan. But if I don’t see you for a while then I’ll send you your playlist and you can listen to it and think of me. As they say, we'll always have Paris.” 

“But we’ve never been to Paris.”

“It’s an expression, Shouyou.”

“Oh.”

He hugged the little redhead tighter for a moment longer before pushing himself away and letting Shouyou retreat to the guardianship of his ex-captain and -vice-captain. They stood in a row, all of the players he had known, and watched as he and Hajime took their places in the passenger and driver’s seats respectively. 

“This is such a shit-box,” Hajime grumbled as he turned over the engine, but Tooru only laughed at him and began queuing songs for the soundtrack to their departure. As the first few distinctive riffs of Boney M’s  _ Sunny  _ ticked on the stereo, he flicked his sunglasses down over his eyes and wound down the window to stick a lazy hand out. Then Hajime was flicking the car into gear and they were sweeping into the late afternoon traffic on an outbound arterial headed west, the sun in their eyes. 

  
  



End file.
